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'Kicking & Screaming' lacks game plan for laughs

It's crushing enough to go to a Will Ferrell movie and realize 20 minutes in that it's really a Will Ferrell children's movie. What's worse is realizing you're watching a Will Ferrell movie that's weirdly, unabashedly, blissfully unfunny. Ferrell — that galumphing, guileless manboy with a nest of curls and close-set dots for eyes — could have done so much more to make the suburban soccer comedy "Kicking & Screaming" a giggly blast filled with his trademark dadaesque goofs, but he doesn't even try.

Universal Pictures 'Kicking & Screaming' 2 out of 5 stars Directors: Jesse Dylan Starring: Will Ferrell, Robert Duvall, Kate Walsh, Mike Ditka, Musetta Vander Run time: 96 minutes Release date: May 13, 2005 Rating: PG for thematic elements, language and some crude humor. See showtimes On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime Rate "Kicking and Screaming"   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

Ferrell functions at half-wattage playing the hesitant but finally overzealous coach of his son's pathetic soccer team, the Tigers, which could easily have been called the Bears, as in "The Bad News Bears." His prefab character, Phil, suffers father issues. He drinks too much coffee. He's a lousy coach. His team wins the championship game. Father issues resolved.

There you have it in what might be the most undeveloped screenplay of the year. It was written by the fine team who brought us "The Santa Clause" and "Space Jam," which, we all remember fondly, starred Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny. So many holes and missed opportunities riddle the movie — it totally fails to mine the soccer-mom phenomenon, which you'd think is the whole premise — that it feels like big swaths of story have been chopped out with a chainsaw. There's no sense of time, and all those montages only blur our orientation.

Robert Duvall is Ferrell's crusty father, whose competitiveness with his athletically challenged son is a pathology. (They have zero chemistry.) He glares at Ferrell, taunts him and challenges his manhood. He whips him bad at tetherball, leaving Ferrell dappled with red welts. There's a "Great Santini" joke waiting to happen here, but the filmmakers pass on it, if they even saw it. They introduce a lesbian couple whose adopted Asian son plays on Ferrell's team. The situation is played for one dumb joke, then dropped. And his character's newfound coffee addiction — what was that about?

Oh, there's a gag or three that Ferrell bull's-eyes. It's fun to watch his geeky bravado get squashed by tykes or hear him call an aggressive child a "jackal from hell!" But mostly we're fed rancid leftovers from bad sitcom land. You know the gag in which a man's toupee blows off, exposing a — surprise! — shiny dome? Well, that's here.

Almost as annoying as the shabby writing is Jesse Dylan's directionless direction. He has no idea where to put the camera, his staging and composition — oh, why bother. If "Kicking & Screaming" took more than 15 days to make — five days to write, 10 to shoot — then, folks, we have a major mystery on our hands.

This toothless trifle is harmless enough, but it doesn't belong in a movie theater. With its strenuously innocuous tenor and dunderheaded moralizing out of "Air Bud," its home is on the family shelf at Blockbuster, dusty and buried deep.

Did I mention that Mike Ditka has a substantial role in the movie? He does. He's not funny.