Basketball Movie Review
Semi-Pro
Will Ferrell owns, coaches, promotes and occasionally plays for the Flint Tropics while the ABA behaves exactly as responsibly as that sentence suggests.
Stupid in the correct direction. It turns the ABA's real carnival energy up another ten percent and somehow makes basketball history useful to the joke.
Movie details
2008 · 1h 32m · Comedy
Director Kent Alterman
- Will Ferrell
- Woody Harrelson
- André Benjamin
- Maura Tierney
- The Flint Tropics are fictional, but the film is set in 1976 — the ABA's final season before four clubs joined the NBA.
- The movie's red-white-and-blue-ball chaos is rooted in the real ABA, a league famous for huge personalities, aggressive promotion and basketball ideas the NBA later absorbed.
01
The Take
Semi-Pro is not trying to respect the dignity of professional basketball. Good. The ABA was already full of wild promotions, unstable franchises and huge personalities, so Jackie Moon feels less like pure invention than he probably should. The comedy works best when the league's genuine history is only slightly less ridiculous than the gag.
02
Does the Basketball Hold Up?
The games are broad and physical, with enough real basketball structure to let the jokes land. The movie knows the ABA's red-white-and-blue aesthetic, loose promotional culture and impending merger are funnier if the basketball underneath them is recognisable.
03
Best Basketball Moment
The Tropics 'inventing' the alley-oop. Completely stupid, historically wrong and exactly the kind of basketball joke that only works because everybody watching knows what an alley-oop is.
04
Ball Cred
It mines a real league, a real merger era and real ABA mythology instead of dropping basketball into a generic sports-comedy shell. The history is bent, not ignored.