121 min | PG-13 | June 26, 2020 | Netflix
Two Icelanders from a fishing village chase a lifelong dream of winning the Eurovision Song Contest. Will Ferrell sulks behind a fake accent while Rachel McAdams sings her heart out. The songs believe in the dream more than the comedy does.
Lars Erickssong is a middle-aged Icelander from a fishing village who has chased one dream since childhood. He wants to win the Eurovision Song Contest. His singing partner Sigrit believes in elves and in him, in roughly that order. A freak accident clears their path to represent Iceland on the biggest stage in European pop. The film wants to be both an affectionate spoof of Eurovision’s gaudy excess and an earnest story about small-town people reaching for something enormous. It commits fully to neither, and the seams show.
Will Ferrell plays Lars as a man-child with a wounded ego and a fake accent he never quite controls. The performance leans on the same note for two hours. Lars sulks, then dreams, then sulks again. Rachel McAdams plays Sigrit with a warmth the script does not earn, and she anchors every scene she is in. Dan Stevens steals the film as Alexander Lemtov, a Russian heartthrob whose smolder hides an open secret, and he plays the character’s vanity with a precision Ferrell never finds. Pierce Brosnan plays Lars’s disapproving father Erick with stone-faced contempt and almost no dialogue.
David Dobkin directs from a script by Ferrell and Harper Steele, and the direction treats the songs better than the jokes. The “Song-Along” set piece, where Eurovision contestants from years past trade verses in Lemtov’s mansion, is the one sequence where staging, editing, and music lock together. The camera glides between performers and the cuts land on the beat. Everywhere else the editing lets scenes sprawl past their punchlines. The original songs, especially “Husavik,” are produced with real conviction, and they expose how slack the comedy around them is.
The movie keeps stranding its best ideas in dead air. For every inspired bit there is a flat stretch that drains the momentum the music builds. Dobkin and Ferrell clearly love Eurovision, and that affection is the film’s saving grace and its trap. They are too fond of the spectacle to satirize it and too committed to the gags to take the emotion seriously. What remains is a long, loud, intermittently funny tribute that works best when nobody is talking and the singing starts.