Ferrell goes for laughs, gets them

Are you ready for another moment of idiocy?
By CARLA MEYER
SACRAMENTO BEE
The hilarious family film "Kicking & amp; Screaming" contains two suspenseful elements. One involves a "Bad News Bears"-like team of soccer misfits and its prospect of ever winning a game. The other lies in predicting the exact moment Will Ferrell will cut loose.
You know it has to happen. At some point, Ferrell will get a maniacal gleam in his eye and behave like an idiot. "Kicking & amp; Screaming" builds toward this moment slowly and carefully and then ... well, Ferrell just goofs for the rest of the film. This part of the movie is just as funny as what came before it, but perhaps more so for older kids and adults, who will understand the subtleties in Ferrell's improvisations.
Ferrell plays Phil, a Chicagoan who has built a peace-loving life in response to his gonzo father, Buck (Robert Duvall), a sporting goods store owner and ultra-competitive soccer coach who leads Phil's son's team. Phil never was the athlete his father wanted, as we see in a funny sequence that opens the film, and Phil's son (Dylan McLaughlin, cute without being cutesy) doesn't make the cut, either.
Played by Duvall in his crusty-old-salt mode, Buck explains to Phil that he had to trade his own grandson to another team. He also ridicules Phil's choice of career: selling vitamins. When Phil tells him he could use a few vitamins himself, Buck responds that he takes a vitamin every day: "It's called a steak." Duvall delivers this line with "napalm in the morning" gusto.
Wrong is right
Much of the humor in the picture's first half rests with Phil's inability to ever say or do the right thing. Polite and calm on the surface, he represses a lot of anger, which will find its way out as the film progresses. On a few occasions, he breaks down out of frustration. Nobody cries quite like Ferrell, whose inner child seems to overtake his adult face. When Phil's wife (Kate Walsh) tries to comfort him by telling him she loves him, he wails, "What does that have to do with anything?"
When he agrees to coach the Tigers, the losing team to which his son has been assigned, he starts off by offending the lesbian moms (Laura Kightlinger and Rachael Harris) of a tiny, bespectacled player (Elliot Cho) by inadvertently calling them "different." His cluelessness leads him to gift his players with finches in little cages -- a gag that's funny on its own and pays dividends later with one of the film's more uproarious lines.
All this happens while Phil is still at his most contained, although he has found a way to stick it to his dad, whose winning team the Tigers must face. Phil recruits Mike Ditka, playing himself, to be his assistant coach. Ditka is Buck's next-door neighbor and sworn enemy, mostly because there's room for only one grizzled tough guy on any given block.
"Kicking & amp; Screaming," heretofore kept humming by director Jesse Dylan (Bob's son), nearly comes to a stop with the introduction of Ditka, who is very much a personality and not at all an actor. But Dylan adjusts the tempo to accommodate the big man.
As Phil starts to lose it, Ferrell commandeers the movie. Most Ferrell comedies share an indicator of when the wild man will emerge: It's the moment the actor takes off his shirt to reveal his hairy torso. Here, the shirt comes off when Phil plays tetherball with his dad -- a grudge match that leaves an impact on Phil's body.