Will Ferrell is in one of the bestmoviesof the summer and one of the worst.
The curly-haired comedian was one of the defining stars of my adolescence, with a run of movies that a generation of comedy fans quoted endlessly. Elf, Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Step Brothers, and The Other Guys were the big ones, but even lesser efforts like Blades of Glory and Semi-Pro were in the rotation when me and my friends wanted to make each other laugh. Will Ferrell is an iconic performer and when I was a teen I was convinced he was the funniest person alive.
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I could still be convinced that’s the case, but Ferrell’s recent output hasn’t done much to remind audiences why he’s a star.
Like a lot of movie comedians, Ferrell has spent much of the past half-decade on streaming. He’s starred in just a few theatrical releases in the last five years, after the box office failure of Holmes & Watson in 2018. Since then, he appeared in The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part and starred with Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Downhill, the American remake of Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure. Those projects (which both underperformed) are the outliers in Ferrell’s recent career.
Most of his recent work has been for streamers, with roles in Between Two Ferns: The Movie (for Netflix), Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (for Netflix), The Shrink Next Door (for Apple), and Spirited (for Apple). That’s a trajectory that other stars like Adam Sandler and Kevin Hart have also taken. That move to streaming was a response to the death of the theatrical comedy, but comedy’s biggest stars jumping ship has also made the situation worse.
This year, though, there are reasons to be optimistic. Comedies have been showing signs of life at the box office, with Asteroid City and No Hard Feelings performing fairly well, and Bottoms putting up a huge per screen average in limited release. And Ferrell actually plays a role in the biggest comedy release of this year (and any year), as the president of Mattel in Greta Gerwig’sBarbie. It’s good to see him on the big screen again — even if it is in a smaller role.
It’s certainly preferable to only hearing his voice out of the mangy mouth of a naive pup in the raunchy dog comedy Strays. This is Ferrell’s biggest theatrical starring role in three years, and it’s a bummer that this is what he chose. Despite a gag or two that works, Strays just isn’t a good movie despite starring two extremely funny dudes — Ferrell and Jamie Fox. It feels like a waste of his talent, and it’s the kind of script he wouldn’t have pulled out of his bottom drawer in his heyday.
Ferrell is 56 and if getting older means that he primarily takes on supporting roles, so be it. There’s a generation of younger comedians that are working to revive the theatrical comedy, too — people like Molly Gordon, Ayo Edebiri, Rachel Sennott, Patti Harrison, and Bowen Yang. But, if the theatrical comedy is going to complete the comeback this summer seems to indicate it may be in the middle of, it would help if its biggest stars were putting their best feet forward, too.
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