At the 2002 World Winter Sport Games, raunchy sex addict Chazz Michael Michaels and sheltered, effeminate Jimmy MacElroy tie for the male single skating gold. Standing together on the podium, the two start an argument which escalates into a fistfight. They are stripped of their medals and banned for life from competitive skating.
Three and a half years later, both have grudgingly taken on alternative occupations. Chazz performs in a children's ice show, while Jimmy works at a sporting goods store. His stalker, Hector, tells him of a loophole: he is only banned from competing in men's singles skating, and can still compete in pairs.
Jimmy contacts Coach Goddard in hope of entering the upcoming World Winter Sport Games. Looking for a pairs partner at the children's ice show, he runs into the just-fired Chazz. They fight and are arrested. Watching the news video of their fight, Coach Goddard gets an idea. He visits them in jail to convince them to skate as the first-ever male-male pairs team.
Coach Goddard puts them up in his cabin and arranges a secret rink for practice, telling them they must learn to get along to skate together. Jimmy and Chazz perform well at the Winter Sports Games qualifiers, and start to bond, worrying brother and sister competitors Stranz and Fairchild Van Waldenberg. The Van Waldenbergs guilt their sister Katie into secretly filming Jimmy and Chazz practicing. Jimmy and Katie are attracted and Chazz coaches Jimmy on how to ask her out. After they go on a date, Katie's siblings threaten to harm Jimmy unless Katie seduces Chazz to make Jimmy jealous.
Coach Goddard tells Jimmy and Chazz they must perform the complicated and dangerous "Iron Lotus" maneuver to wow the judges. The only prior attempt resulted in the man decapitating the woman; Goddard is convinced it only failed because it should have been two men performing it.
Katie pretends to be a member of Chazz's sex addicts meeting, then invites Chazz to her room and tries to seduce him. Chazz refuses out of respect for Jimmy, which delights her. But Chazz can't resist grabbing her breasts. Jimmy arrives and witnesses this, and is outraged at their betrayals and runs off despite Chazz's attempts to apologize.
Stranz and Fairchild kidnap Chazz and Jimmy to sabotage their performance. Chazz escapes and skates on the waterways all the way to the arena, with Stranz in hot pursuit.
While Fairchild is restraining Jimmy, she reveals that she and her brother demanded that Katie have sex with Chazz to make him jealous, and that Chazz wouldn't go through with it out of respect for him. Jimmy, overjoyed, escapes as well.
Chazz and Jimmy arrive at the ice rink just in time to compete. Fairchild breaks her necklace and throws a pearl onto the ice. Chazz skates over it and breaks his ankle, rendering him unable to perform his role in the Iron Lotus. Jimmy and Chazz switch places. Although they have never practiced each other's roles, they perform it perfectly, and win the competition.
Jimmy reconciles with Katie. Stranz and Fairchild are arrested. They argue before kissing each other incestuously. Jimmy and Chazz are awarded the gold medal and fly off into the sky via rockets on their skates.
Cast
Will Ferrell as Chazz Michael Michaels, a professional skater. Chad Brennan serves as a skating double of Chazz.
Jon Heder as Jimmy MacElroy, a self-taught professional skater. Ethan Burgess serves as a skating double for Jimmy.
Zachary Ferren as young Jimmy MacElroy
Will Arnett as Stranz Van Waldenberg, a rival skater of Chazz and Jimmy.
Amy Poehler as Fairchild Van Waldenberg, a skater and the sister of Stranz.
William Fichtner as Darren MacElroy, a wealthy man and former horse breeder who adopts orphans with exceptional athletic abilities like he did with Jimmy while also said to have controversial training methods for those he adopts.
Jenna Fischer as Katie Van Waldenberg, the younger sister of Stranz and Fairchild.
Craig T. Nelson as Coach Darren Goddard, the ice skating coach of Jimmy who later assists him and Chazz.
Romany Malco as Jesse, a man who helps Coach Goddard train Jimmy and Chazz.
Nick Swardson as Hector, an obsessive fan of Jimmy who informs him of a loophole that will enable him to bypass the ban.
The film was based on Busy Philipps' idea and she worked on the screenplay. However, in an oral history about the movie for Nerdist, Craig Cox fully attributed the idea of Blades of Glory to his brother, Jeff Cox. The oral history has since been updated with information about Philipps' contributions.[2] Phillips discussed the incident in her memoir, This Will Only Hurt A Little, stating that she should be credited as a co-writer in the credits and that she had registered the idea with the Writers Guild of America West at its inception, having come up with the concept – even suggesting Will Ferrell as one of the two co-leads (alongside Ben Stiller) – while she and then-boyfriend Craig were watching television together when he visited her in Vancouver, during production of White Chicks.[4]Seth Rogen has also said that he and his writing partner Evan Goldberg wrote a draft of the screenplay that included some of the "biggest jokes" featured in the finished movie, but they were ultimately fired and did not receive any credit.[5]
All of the scenes at the National Figure Skating Championships and World Wintersport Games were shot at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena. The stadium used for the outside shoots is the Montreal Olympic Stadium, built for the 1976 Olympics. The outdoor chase scenes were also shot on-location in Montreal. The building used for athlete housing in Montreal was the unique Habitat 67, built for Expo 67. The film was delayed for a small undetermined period of time when Jon Heder broke his ankle while doing a skating program for the film.[6]
Reception
Box office
Blades of Glory grossed $118.2 million in the U.S. and Canada and $26.3 million in other territories, for a total of $145.7 million.[7]
The film grossed $33 million in its opening weekend from 3,372 theaters, averaging $9,790 per screen, topping fellow new release Meet the Robinsons to finish in first.[8] It made $22.5 million in its second weekend, dropping just 32.1% and remaining in first. It then made $13.8 million in its third weekend and $7.7 million in its fourth, finishing in second and third place, respectively.[9]
Critical response
Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gave the film an approval rating of 70% based on 188 reviews, with an average rating of 6.3/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Thanks to the spirited performances of a talented cast – particularly Will Ferrell and Jon Heder as rivals-turned-teammates – Blades of Glory successfully spoofs inspirational sports dramas with inspired abandon."[10] On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 64 out of 100, based on 35 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[11] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.[12]
The Monthly critic Luke Davies accepted the film as a fun romp, comparing it to Will Ferrell's previous movies Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and wrote positively of Ferrell's performance, describing that "there is a parodic exhilaration to everything Ferrell does; there's always the sense that any scene is precariously close to being a blooper reel." However, Davies conceded that, like the other two films, the plot was "formulaic ... [with] an obviousness to the set-ups, a no-nonsense compression, a sometimes clunky transition from one sequence to the next" but that it was the film's ability to "venture to fantastically absurd places – to set aside the rapid and hokey forward movement – and there to idle in neutral, in zones of pure comic exploration" and offer "moments of expansive hilarity ... that made the films worthwhile."[13]
