The Trailer for the New Will Ferrell Comedy Dropped and I Defy Anyone to Know What to Make of It

Personally I think there is no one in Hollywood whose movie trailers are harder to get a handle on than Will Ferrell. He's a comedian who swings for the fences. He'll either connect and it into the upper deck or he'll make no contact and spin himself into the dirt. And there's almost no way of knowing from watching a carefully edited two to three minute clip. 

I remember seeing the trailer for "Step Brothers" and thinking it looked like a burning oil spill, but it's one of my ten favorite comedies of all time. "Zoolander" looked like weird, high concept stuff, but suffered only because it hit theaters two weeks after 9/11 and achieved cult classic status on cable. More recently, they put the "Step Brothers" gang back together for "Holmes & Watson," and it looked like, "OK. Those guys doing their treatment of the genius detective genre, it could be promising." But it turned out to be so bad the studio intentionally didn't release it until Christmas week so it would avoid making every "Worst Movies of 2018" list. zFerrell is a performer who takes big chances, rarely plays it safe with something like "Betwitched," and either creates greatness or fails spectacularly. 

So with all that said, I don't know what to make of this. Rachel McAdam is in it, which is a plus. The director David Dobkin did "Wedding Crashers," so huge plus there. But then he followed it up with "Fred Claus," so he sort of broke even there. I guess musical parody is a rich mine to go in search of comedy, when it's done right like "Spinal Tap" and "Walk Hard." But parodies of Scandinavian music? As unintentionally funny as ABBA can be, I'm not sure there's some vast, untapped well of humor to be gleaned from Nordic pop. Still, thank you to Ferrell for keeping my memories of Andrew Ridgely alive.. He is not forgotten in this man's heart, I can tell you that. 

If I had to guess - and I've pretty much painted myself into the rhetorical corner to go just that - I'm betting that this will be a swing and a miss. Like another "Blades of Glory," which was basically and SNL sketch watered down to movie length. I hope I'm wrong because we're relying on Netlfix to crank out quality content as much as any institution in America right now.