Remember how, in that SNL book, Ferrell represented the hip future of comedy, mocking the smug boomer shtick of a Chevy Chase? Ferrell has never felt, well, older than he does here, doing a silly Sherlock Holmes accent, vamping like crazy and basically sucking all the air out of every room he walks into. Okay, it’s probably officially time to worry. What if you threw an improv-comedy movie but no one bothered to show up? This is what happens. Ferrell can barely be roused from his slumber he seems exhausted and depressed, and it’s sort of hard to blame him. Andrew Jay Cohen’s incompetent direction - the movie doesn’t even build up to jokes, let alone follow them through - leads to an airless, desperate comedy in which every cast member is stranded. Has Ferrell ever looked this dispirited and listless? What sounds like a solid, if high-concept, premise - a couple attempt to pay for their daughter’s college by setting up a casino in their suburban neighborhood - is DOA here, quite possibly the worst movie everyone involved has ever been in. Which movie best captures the Will Ferrell Experience? As always, this list is purely scientific and unassailable. This list isn’t solely a ranking of the best films to feature Ferrell, though there’s an aspect of that it’s more a ranking of the films by their maximizing of Ferrell’s essence. And no glorified cameos - sorry, Wedding Crashers, Starsky & Hutch, and, yikes, Boat Trip. Now, to properly rank Ferrell movies, we had to put down some ground rules: No movies in which Ferrell is only a voice actor - this excludes Megamind, but not The Lego Movie no movies that went direct to video - sorry, 1997’s Men Seeking Women, in which Ferrell was a supporting actor to Grant Shaud. This means that there’s a trove of Ferrell movies to dig through and rank. Ferrell’s post- SNL movie career - and he has been gone from the show for 18 years - has been among the most successful in the show’s history he has now been headlining big-budget studio comedies for more than a decade. Will Ferrell is now 52 years old. That’s older than Marlon Brando was when he was in The Godfather. We have updated it to include Ferrell’s recent work, including this week’s Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, currently out on Netflix. This post was originally published in 2015.

Movies like night at the roxbury