Big-screen offerings tailed off in the week after the release of The Odyssey, so now is a perfect time to see what the streamers are offering to combat theatrical lineups.
Oh, man … the latest from Will Ferrell, Netflix’s 10-episode series The Hawk, will make you want to go hide in a theater and never leave. It will make you afraid to turn on your TV and catch an accidental whiff of this excrement.
I’ve had arguments with folks over the years about Will Ferrell: I insist that he is very funny, while friends and colleagues insist that he’s an unfunny hack whose shtick has grown tired.
I don’t know … I might be starting to agree with them. Ferrell has made some real stinkers over the last decade and a half (with the exception of Spirited and his supporting turn in Barbie). I thought last year’s Amazon Prime nightmare, You’re Cordially Invited, represented his low point, but we have a new Worst Ferrell Project.
Yes, The Hawk is the worst thing he’s ever done, and I’ve seen The House and Get Hard. This travesty casts Ferrell as Lonnie “The Hawk” Hawkins, a washed-up golf pro, and it is utterly devoid of laughter.
I remember the days when I would get up in the morning, and have a bagel or some shit like that, and then start laughing to myself remembering something from Saturday Night Live, Anchorman or Step Brothers. Then I would go to work, my favorite bar or the local drug den and regale those around with recaps of what made me laugh so hard.
Those days are long past; they died somewhere around 2010 with The Other Guys, Ferrell’s last great comedy as a headliner. It doesn’t help matters that Ferrell has a longstanding feud with his former comedy brother-in-arms, Adam McKay, who directed Step Brothers, Anchorman, Talladega Nights … basically all of the movies that made Ferrell a comic giant.
Now we get this sports-comedy slop, with Ferrell trying to make us laugh with a funny hairdo and lame jokes about his balls. Four of the episodes are directed by David Gordon Green, another former comedy giant (Pineapple Express) who has fallen on hard times since directing the last three Halloween sequels (“Evil dies tonight!”) and, oh god, The Exorcist: Believer. Green seems to have forgotten how to produce both scares and laughter. He needs to go back to making dramas with Zooey Deschanel.
Also laboring through this mess is the great Molly Shannon, as Lonnie’s angry soon-to-be ex-wife. Shannon isn’t given anything to really do here, meaning a great opportunity to have the SNL alums together again is blown. Fortune Feimster fares a little better as Sam, Lonnie’s inexperienced caddy. She’s no laugh riot, but she squeezes off a good riff or two. Only Luke Wilson does anything that could be considered consistently funny as Golden Fisk, Lonnie’s competitor and arch nemesis—who actually might be an OK guy.
Ferrell is in pure mugging mode for the entirety of the series, trying to do for golf what he did for car racing in Talladega Nights. Stick, a recent Apple TV+ golfing comedy series starring Owen Wilson, did the sport—and the world of comedy—much better. So did Happy Gilmore. Heck, the mediocre Happy Gilmore 2 is Caddyshack compared to The Hawk.
Will Ferrell … please eat a huge helping of humble pie and make nice with Adam McKay! McKay has said he’d be willing to work with Ferrell again; here’s hoping that Ferrell sees the light and buries the hatchet. No “comedy” is as unfunny as Ferrell sans McKay. The Hawk is the ultimate proof of this.
