Nul points: Ferrell’s shtick has finally run its course
Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga
★★★★★
Dir David Dobkin Starring Will Ferrell, Rachel Mcadams, Dan Stevens, Melissanthi Mahut, Demi Lovato, Mikael Persbrandt, Pierce Brosnan
Sending up the Eurovision Song Contest is like flattening Salisbury Plain: one quick look at the thing should be enough to reassure you that the job took care of itself long ago. Nevertheless, Will Ferrell has given it a shot, and the result is this pulverisingly unfunny and vacuous two-hour gauntlet run of non-tertainment.
Allow me to declare myself a long-standing Ferrell fan: I think his Noughties menagerie of loose-cannon man-children is a genuinely artistically significant body of work, as well as a wildly entertaining one. But the shtick has unquestionably run its course, and two recent attempts to spin it off in interesting new directions – Downhill and Holmes & Watson – both ended in laughless calamity.
In Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, the same applies. Ferrell plays Lars Erickssong, an Icelandic Eurovision obsessive and one half of the amateur pop duo Fire Saga, who has dreamt of representing his nation at the contest since childhood. His bandmate is Sigrit Ericksdottir (Rachel Mcadams), a fey and naive lifelong friend who is “probably not” also his sister – though Lars’s absurdly handsome father Erick Erickssong (a game Pierce Brosnan) went through a womanising period, so no one in their remote fishing village can be entirely confident she isn’t. This is the film’s one good joke.
Thanks to a sequence of events that owes an equal debt to King Ralph and Father Ted, Fire Saga manage to secure a place in the Eurovision finals by default – so off they jet to the host city of Edinburgh, and promptly fall prey to the usual showbusiness pitfalls. One comes in the lissom form of Dan Stevens’s Alexander Lemtov, a predatory Russian contender who seems to have designs on Sigrit, while Lars is beguiled in turn by Mita Xenakis (Melissanthi Mahut), the comely Greek entrant, and his own ballooning ego.
Unwarranted confidence and all-consuming rivalries are standard Ferrellian dynamics. But perhaps thanks to the film’s official (and ubiquitous) Eurovision branding, every punch feels pulled, and every gag fine-tooth-combed for potential PR sore points to be neutralised.
It’s the comedic equivalent of one of those bland, glassy-eyed international blockbusters that’s designed to be sold to the Chinese and American markets with no adjustments – not a film so much as two hours of lump-free, vaguely film-like audio-visual paste. The one identifiable bit of local colour? Graham Norton, playing himself in the commentary booth, and looking for the most part like he’d rather be anywhere else in the world. One sympathises.