Will Ferrell Has Completely Lost It

It is almost impossible to overstate just how disappointing Netflix’s new series The Hawk is. How do you take Will Ferrell, Molly Shannon, Jimmy Tatro, Fortune Feimster, and Luke Wilson, hand them to director David Gordon Green, and come away with something this inert? Whatever magic the Ferrell-McKay partnership once had clearly curdles without McKay in the room. There’s none of the absurdism and none of the flickering humanity that made Step Brothers, Anchorman, and Talladega Nights sing — just the noise those movies had the good sense to build something around.

There’s maybe a 90-minute movie’s worth of material here (or a really long SNL skit), but they stretched it across ten episodes. It’s not a TV show so much as it’s a marketing vehicle for 30-second promos. And here’s the thing: there’s a reason The Hawk isn’t a feature film. It’s because the feature already exists. It’s called Happy Gilmore, and the Sandman at least knew better than to overstretch his premise (at least until he made Happy Gilmore 2).

There’s already a golf comedy series, too. It’s on Apple TV, it’s called The Stick, and while it hasn’t exactly torn up the ratings, it grasps the one thing The Hawk never does: the difference between a series and a movie. A series has to build its characters, evolve them, ground them into actual people. The Hawk is the first act of a movie, then the third act, with eight second acts jammed in between — which, let me remind you, is the part nobody likes.

Ferrell, who co-created the series with Harper Steele (his SNL partner in the far superior Will & Harper documentary), runs the same three jokes into the ground. He plays Lonnie Hawk, your standard-issue Ferrell blowhard circa 1998 — except this time, even with David Gordon Green behind the camera, none of the humanity that lets Danny McBride redeem these same oversized clowns ever surfaces. Lonnie is loud, he’s obnoxious, he talks to his golf ball, and he supposedly appeals to people who don’t watch golf. He’s also well past his prime, and after choking away his shot at the U.S. Open — and his grand slam — he’s slid into obscurity.

After his caddy (Keith David) drops dead on the course, Lonnie hires a random woman, Sam (Fortune Feimster), whom he finds in a Walmart parking lot — and for the record, the show’s few jokes about Walmart and Chili’s double as product placement, which tells you exactly how much anyone cared — and sets off on his inevitable comeback tour.

Meanwhile, his son Lance Hawk (Jimmy Tatro) is the up-and-comer, the talk of the golf world, the heir apparent to the nickname The Hawk. Lonnie can’t stand it; Lance chokes whenever his father is within a hundred yards. Molly Shannon plays the mom and estranged wife, who curses with real creativity and is dating a man who is obviously gay (David Hornsby), because apparently ’90s humor is back.

Not one of these people is likable, and not one earns a shred of sympathy — not Lonnie, not Lance, not Shannon’s Stacy. Certainly not Luke Wilson’s Golden Fisk, who is basically running the Timothy Olyphant role in his brother Owen Wilson’s The Stick: a charming, sleazy opp. I genuinely can’t find a single character in The Hawk worth caring about, which might work for an anti-hero drama but is death for a long ten-episode underdog sports comedy, where the whole point is having someone to root for.

What’s left is a lineup of one-joke caricatures: Lonnie is discount Happy Gilmore; Lance is every Jimmy Tatro character ever assembled; Shannon’s Mary Katherine Gallagher has more depth (and more laughs) than Stacy; Feimster is a lesbian Otto — Allen Covert’s homeless hanger-on from Happy Gilmore — with a rap sheet; Chris Parnell’s entire bit is that he can’t get over Lonnie sleeping with his wife 40 years ago; Lance’s fiancée, Natalie (Katelyn Tarver), exists solely to ban meat and alcohol; and Hornsby’s one joke is that he’s gay, which — again — isn’t a joke. It’s the same episode, remixed, ten times.

I’ll grant that The Hawk might have made a barely watchable movie, if only because the finale twist is kind of fun. But everything before it lies there flat, like five and a half hours of bottom-shelf Ferrell — Blades of Glory, Kicking & Screaming, the stuff you forget you watched. And I love Will Ferrell. His work with McKay still holds up, and Stranger than Fiction is one of my favorite movies. But The Hawk takes a running header onto the pool deck. Those old Ferrell characters work in short bursts; The Hawk drags the joke out into the driveway, beats it senseless, rips out its heart, and stomps on it. It’s a lousy series, even as brain-dead summer escapism.