Of all the Saturday Night Live alumni to hit movie pay dirt, Will Ferrell is the only one who never acts as if he's bigger than his material. In one sense, that's fitting. His body is only moderately expressive (he uses his flab to droll effect), and his face is mild to the point of blobbiness. Yet I'd rather see a new Ferrell movie than one by any of his fellow SNL graduates. He has a sweet spirit missing from other contemporary screen clowns; he finds the poetry in fatuousness. In Anchorman, Talladega Nights, and the new Blades of Glory, Ferrell lovingly ravages the American male psyche. It might be argued that the targets of these movies--TV blowhards and celebrity athletes--are easy pickings, and that the films are simply full-length parodies of junk genres. But those parodies are an artful mix of tight craftsmanship and gags that spin out like adolescent free associations. Machismo goes hand in dainty hand with homosexual panic, while real men are those who overcome their fear of looking like sissies.

In Blades of Glory, Ferrell plays figure skater Chazz Michael Michaels, a sex-obsessed galoot who fondles his female fans and ends his twirls by clutching his crotch and trash-talking his opponents. This is in stark contrast to his rival, Jimmy MacElroy (Jon Heder), the girlish blond orphan who closes his balletic routines by gently releasing a white dove. After the pair breaks into fisticuffs (the child-fans weep, a teddy-bear mascot goes up in flames), an all-star skating tribunal bans the brute and the femme from competition. But a loophole emerges: They may compete in pairs skating!

Blades of Glory is far more conventional than its predecessors, which were directed and co-written by Ferrell's steady collaborator, Adam McKay. The odd-couple buddy premise is flabby, and the film has no spasms of genius to equal the stylings of Sacha Baron Cohen as a prim gay French existentialist car-racer in Talladega Nights or the news team's impromptu a cappella "Afternoon Delight" in Anchorman. But the laughs glide in, one after another. The directors, Will Speck and Josh Gordon, nail the subtext and straight-faced deportment of Ferrell's best movies. Although I'm not sure Heder's dorky mouth-breather shtick--the joke is he's both spacey and prickly--has much stretch, his slumpy affect and stringy frame match up wondrously with Ferrell's beefiness. There's a hetero romance between emotionally abused ingénues: Jimmy and a radiantly pretty Jenna Fischer as the sister of a conniving brother-sister skating team. But that's window dressing. What powers the movie are the gross-out gags--approach the revelation of the ultimate skating move, the Iron Lotus, with caution!--and the scenes in which each man learns to overcome his revulsion to touching/being touched by another dude.

I'm looking forward to buying Blades of Glory on DVD so I can get my head around the phenomenal skating routines. Obviously, there were wires and lifts and computer-generated effects, but for my money it looked like the lumbering Ferrell and nerdy Heder were Olympic-worthy stylists. The triple lutzes make the heart leap. The climactic ice dance--to Queen's immortal theme from Flash Gordon ("Flash! Ah-ahhhh! Savior of the universe!")--might be the apotheosis of man-boy love. Platonic, of course, as befits the idealized medium of ice-skating.