Semi-Pro

There’s a good comedy to be made about the American Basketball Association — which gave us, among other things, the three-point shot — but Semi-Pro isn’t it.

If the movies had a post-season, this one would miss the playoffs. By a mile. Come to think of it, the title itself is my one-word review.

Semi-Pro is a basketball romp set in 1976, a fictionalized account of the final season in the existence of the maverick ABA. Not that you really learn anything about the subject from the jumbled script by Scot Armstrong.

For major comedy star Will Ferrell, this is yet another sports comedy. He’s already made a racing car comedy, a figure skating comedy, and a soccer comedy. If you check with the official scorer, you’ll learn that that makes four jock parodies in four years. So let’s be kind and call it one too many. Okay, two too many. Ferrell has announced that this will be it for sports comedies for him, at least for awhile: Good call.

Ferrell stars as Jackie Moon, the playing coach-owner of the American Basketball Association’s Flint Michigan Tropics, a ragtag group of hoops losers playing in front of lots and lots of empty seats.

Jackie, a strutting, bombastic narcissist with a penchant for outrageous promotion, has dribbled over from the music biz, where he previously prospered as a one-hit wonder with his chart-topping “Love Me Sexy.” But his dream was to own a basketball team. And now he has one, the league doormat.

Then Jackie learns of the league’s plans to disband and merge with (that is, be swallowed by) the NBA, with only the top four teams — the Nets, Pacers, Nuggets, and Spurs — becoming NBA franchises while the others disappear overnight.

So Jackie decides to improve the team, push to finish fourth, become one of the league’s elite quartet, and thus survive. He starts by trading the team’s washing machine for a washed-up player named Monix, played by Woody Harrelson (whose basketball credibility was established in White Men Can’t Jump), a former benchwarmer for the Boston Celtics. Monix does have a championship ring, but he’s also got a bad knee.

Debuting director Kent Alterman, a producer making his directorial debut, throws this one out of bounds right after the opening tipoff. For one thing, Ferrell and Harrelson don’t appear to be in the same movie. The narrative is head-scratchingly incoherent. If you lined up all the scenes in a random progression, the film would make no less sense and have no worse a feel for its subject matter. There’s precious little evidence that the makers know anything at all about basketball in general and the ABA in particular.

Okay, we say to ourselves, but at least the film should be able to have a little satiric fun with ’70s funk and fashion, an easy target if ever there were one. Even that hardly registers.

Like the also-rans on a basketball team who rarely get the ball passed to them, a number of skilled comedy performers drift through the film in support of Ferrell — Harrelson, Maura Tierney, Will Arnett, Andy Richter — but no one gets to make a shot or corral a laugh.

It’s not that Ferrell hogs the ball; it’s that the coach — um, director — has no game plan, so his players don’t know what to do when it’s their turn to perform.

As for the film’s rating, Ferrell’s three previous sports comedies were rated either PG or PG-13. This one is rated R for its language, but its obscenities seem forced, as if delivered by a group of middle schoolers who have just discovered the pleasures of cursing without having first mastered the art of picking their spots.

So we’ll clang one off the rim and call it 1 star out of 4 for a movie that’s not even semi-funny.

Semi-Pro is a semi-professional B-movie about semi-professional B-ball, with ABA in this case standing for Alarmingly Bad Altogether.