Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

I know, I know...I'm about three weeks late. Everyone with even a remote interest in Will Ferrell or NASCAR racing or Hollywood summer comedies has already seen Talladega and made their opinions known. But I'd just end up reviewing the thing when it came out on DVD anyway, so let's just do this thing and get it out of the way now...

I'm not sure I've ever seen a more testicle-obsessed movie than Talladega Nights. Nearly every scene begins and ends with references to Ricky Bobby's balls. When will he grow a pair? Will he get them back after a humiliating defeat? Do his peaches, in fact, have any hair? In the twisted mind of NASCAR champion Ricky Bobby (Ferrell), balls equal manliness which equals success which equals greatness. Happiness is a warm crotch.

Bobby's the latest version of Ferrell's "insane idiot" persona. In fact, he's almost the exact same character as Ron Burgundy, the news man that Ferrell played in his last team-up with co-writer/director Adam McKay. These are two pompous and egomaniacal man-children whose brash (and juvenile) machismo hides vulnerable, sensitive little boys. News anchor Ron Burgundy obsessed over his hair and, of course, stock car racer Ricky Bobby obsesses over his...you get where I'm going with this...

In fact, Talladega is pretty much just a do-over of Ferrell and McKay's prior film. They've even given them parallel sub-titles to tip off audiences to the game:

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

Both titles imply that these stories center exclusively around the Will Ferrell characters. It's his legend and his ballad. This is blatantly fraudulent advertising. Talented and energetic though Ferrell may be, without all the other enthusiastic and funny people filling out the casts of these movies, they'd be unwatchable. They're predictable and repetitive and they rely on non-sequiteur and cheap irony in place of actual jokes. They're two hour collections of jokes about balls, obvious pop culture references, lame screenwriting conventions from the '30s and endless, endless product placement.

But what can I say? I laughed at Anchorman and I laughed even harder at Talladega. Ferrell and McKay may not have any new tricks up their sleeve this time around, but they know how to give funny performers enough room to bring the funny. It's not much, but it's good enough for August.



For a guy who always plays self-aggrandizing assholes who compulsively hog the spotlight, Ferrell's a generous, giving actor. This is undeniably his (forgive me) vehicle, a Will Ferrell comedy featuring the guy in nearly every scene, but Ricky Bobby is hardly the film's lone insane idiot. Here's an incomplete list of the veteran comedians and character actors appeaing in the film:

- Jane Lynch, of Christopher Guest's improv comedies and 40 Year Old Virgin, makes the most from a small role as Ricky's mom
- Gary Cole, the hideous pig of a boss from Office Space, has the best role in the entire film as Ricky's loutish, drug-addled, alcoholic and neglectful father
- John C. Reilly plays Cal Naughton Jr., Ricky's partner and then rival, as a more good-natured and less perverted version of his character from Boogie Nights
- David Koechner, a veteran of "Saturday Night Live" and Anchorman, has a few lines as a pit crew member
- Ian Roberts of Upright Citizens Brigade plays another pit crew member in a glorified cameo
- Ferrell's SNL cohort Molly Shannon does her patented loud, obnoxious oaf routine
- Ali G/Borat/Bruno personifier Sacha Baron Cohen portrays Ricky's gay French antagonist
- Andy Richter appears as the villain's saucy boyfriend

Other actors with less notable resumes do funny work as well. Amy Adams proves her nominated role from Junebug wasn't a fluke, Michael Clarke Duncan is actually funny on occasion as Ricky's pit crew boss and the brilliant duo of Houston Tumlin and Grayson Russell give two of the most hilarious child performances I have ever seen as Ricky's spoiled, aggressive sons. (They're named Walker and Texas Ranger, or T.R. for short.)

These performances make the movie watchable. Cohen creates another wholly original and endearing character using nothing but exaggerated body language and a silly accent. His calculating and smug Jean Girrard bears little similarity with any of his other well-known characters. This movie's nowhere near as brilliant as his feature-length showcase, Borat, which opens this November, but it's still a delightful, chameleon-like turn garnering several of the film's biggest laughs.

With a less imaginative or more disinterested group of collaborators, I have no doubt Talladega Nights would suck the balls it can't stop referencing. Most of the actual jokes fail to connect. Some are even kind of embarrassing. (Scenes featuring Greg Germann as a brown-nosing NASCAR executive and Shannon as his drunk wife go absolutely nowhere and are painful).

I'd say there's, in general, far less funny material here from the outset than McKay and Ferrell devised for Anchorman. Working with the exact same format - a very bad winner starts to lose at life and then realizes what an asshole he has been - they don't seem to really have the feel for the world of stock car racing that they exhibited with the world of local '70s news shows. (Though there are some fall-down funny scenes, nothing approaches the inter-network news battle royale from Anchorman for sheer manic audacity.)

Aside from a terrific sequence in which Ricky's Dad Reese devises challenges to reinvigorate his son's racing career, by far the tightest and most inspired comedy in the film, McKay and Ferrell's script has a rambling, aimless feel. It's nice that they don't rush to some inevitable, happy conclusion, keeping things loose enough to allow the actors room for improvisation and funny little character bits, but the final ratio of scenes that work vs. scenes that aren't funny and make no sense only works out to about 60-40.

All too often, McKay falls back on tearing down the fourth wall and ironically comment on the fact that "it's all a movie." Occasionally, it works and gets a laugh, particularly when mocking the rampant product placement that has become a NASCAR trademark and accordingly permeates this film. The climactic chase scene may be the first in cinema history to actually make time for a commercial interruption. Once or twice in a whole film is fine for self-referential humor, but these kinds of jokes come to feel obvious and gratuitous really fast. Go for more than 5 or 6 and it's like you're trading in the integrity of the film as a story in exchange for a cheap laugh at the expense of sports movie conventions.

I'm not sure why Ferrell and McKay opt constantly for this sort of easy, audience-flattering irony. There's enough going on in Ricky Bobby's story to propel a 90 minute summer comedy. (If there wasn't, I'd say they should have come up with a richer premise with more comic potential. But, come on, there's totally enough jokes to make about NASCAR to fill 90 minutes. It's NASCAR!)

Specifically, Ricky learns that his overzealous, boastful, results-focused and very American pride caused him to lose everything. Eventually, he learns that the world might be a better place if we could all be just a little bit more...French. That is, reserved, open-minded and sophisticated. How does Ricky demonstrate how much he has learned? By deeply kissing another man before a stadium crowd for the benefit of a national audience. Surely this turnaround could have inspired some more examination.

(Also, I would not mind seeing more with Ricky interacting with his foul-mouthed sons. I'm telling you, these two kids are comic dynamos, little monsters who suddenly must confront head-on the horrors of Granny Justice.)

My point is, the best moments in the film are all about the characters, several of whom are creative enough to support an entire movie. Cole's defiant beer-swilling loser should get a spin-off movie in which he joins forces with Billy Bob Thornton's bitter alcoholic clown from Bad Santa.

As in Anchorman, the movie favors the element of surprise over believability. Situations are allowed to play out in terms of what will be the most funny and revealing, as opposed to what makes the story move forward or what makes the most sense. This kind of willfully ridiculous surreality gives the writers and actors the freedom of fill in the world of Talladega with some memorably bizarre little details.

In perhaps the movie's absolute best moment, Cal unburdens hismelf, reavealing a closely-kept secret from his past to a comatose friend. Bloopers running over the closing credits imply the actual scene is only one possible take out of many that Reilly filmed. Were these pre-written scenarios on which he would riff? Was he making this stuff up as he went along? Did Ferrell and McKay actually script out this whole monologue verbatim? I'm not quite sure, but regardless, it's one of the single most hilarious scenes of 2006, hands down, end of story.