That was Jon Heder, in Blades of Glory I think, not Owen Wilson.

Will Ferrell is a very funny guy, but like Robin Williams (and Billy Crystal, and so many other comedians), he has a certain kind of act that he does well.  And, generally speaking, it ain’t movies.  He’s an improv comedian, and he made his name in a sketch comedy show.  But that doesn’t mean he should be expected to carry a 100 minute movie.  That’s a completely different thing, and it relies on having a really talented writing team and a director that gets what makes the actor funny.  And while Anchorman was a pretty decent movie, to me, it worked because it felt like a collection of shorter skits all with a general theme of a boorish man with outdated values living in the height of 70s decadence.  Half the scenes in that movie could have been cut out and not affected the plot at all; most of the comedy was just in making fun of the concept of what men in the 1970s think is cool (and how that doesn’t work anymore), and how incredibly arrogant this one guy was.  The story was a loose framework for silly sketches with exaggerated characters, exactly what Ferrell does best.  Besides, it was an ensemble film.  Steve Carrell, Paul Rudd, Vince Vaughan and Ben Stiller all contributed to the biggest and best comedic scenes, it didn’t expect Ferrell to contribute all the funny by himself.  And that’s what Ferrell is good at: being the most well-rounded goofball in a cast of goofballs.  Most of his solo movies require him to be THE comedic lead, and do all the work himself, and not surprisingly, very few of his movies have worked.  Very few people can pull that off.  Comedy is hard.  100 minutes of comedy must be torture to put together.

Ferrell deserves his fans.  He was incredible on SNL back in the day; he may have saved the whole show from cancellation way back around ’96 (for those not in-the-know, it’s still around and doing OK, but it was near-death back then).  He was in almost every sketch, and he was the only one getting consistent laughs.  But those were five-minute sketches, something that let him be in-your-face goofy, get the joke across, milk it for a few minutes, and then let it go before it got tired.  He’s plenty talented enough to deserve fans, but he just isn’t the right kind of guy for solo movies.  He needs to be in stuff like the better Ben Stiller films (Dodgeball, Tropic Thunder), or even to cameo in a Judd Apatow comedy; he would be great if he was given one of two scenes all to himself to write and lead, a scene only tangentially related to the rest of the plot, something he could play with and make his own while the regular cast try to play off of his lunacy.  But I guess producers think that any recognizable comedian should be able to single-handedly make any picture work (I know there are other talented actors in this movie, but none of them to my knowledge have comedy backgrounds), and so they keep trotting Ferrell out to sell a movie that’s way too big for him to handle himself.

One reason I liked this movie as much as I did was because of how small a production it is.  Apparently, it had only a $6 million budget (for comparative purposes, Sandler’s Jack and Jill supposedly cost $80 million), and given it’s original subject matter, I think it turned out pretty well.  It’s not consistently funny, but it’s funny enough to work.  But in the future, Will really needs to find some other comedians to help shoulder the load.