"Figure skating is already gay enough," one disgusted man-on-the-street spits in a sports-news segment about a third of the way through Blades of Glory. He's reacting to the news that disgraced and banished-from-the-profession figure skaters Chazz Michael Michaels (Will Ferrell) and Jimmy MacElroy (Jon Heder) are making a comeback via a loophole that allows them to compete as a team.

With that one line you get the whole premise of Blades, in which the physically improbable Ferrell turns up the polymorphously perverse swagger as the more putatively macho of the duo, while the wispy, perennially befuddled Jon Heder, forsaken not just by the sport but by his creepy billionaire mentor (Jenna Fichtner), wrestles with all manner of identity issues. (And he's got a crazy stalker to boot.) The set up for Blades had the potential to make it one of the great comedies of homosexual panic of our time. That Michael and MacElroy's nemeses are a brother/sister skating team (Amy Poehler and Will Arnett) whose closeness carries more than intimations of incest ups the ante. For a brief period in the film, I was thinking that today's goofy, gross-out comedies could be to the '00s what the horror movie was to the 1970s — thoroughly radical social critiques disguised as not-quite-reputable entertainments.

Alas, Blades of Glory does not follow through in that department. However, it is trim, fast-moving and often quite funny, particularly in the exchanges between Ferrell and Heder — the former's trademark clueless oafishness meshes nicely with the latter's alternating current of petulance and sweetness.

Given that Ben Stiller is one of the producers of the picture, it should come as no surprise that Blades' template is taken directly from Zoolander. Not only does it have the bitter-rivals-unite-for-the-greater-good plot, but its humor also has the same general tenor. The batch of cheesy old hits on the soundtrack (Billy Squier's "The Stroke." Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch's "Good Vibrations," etc.) and characters using out-of-nowhere similes ("like a stack of classic Europorn") are also familiar. A Luke Wilson cameo too? Oh wait, that's a nod to Old School.

Well, you get the idea. Even the surprises aren't particularly surprising here. But the comic performers all deliver — there's a pretty hilarious chase on skates, but not on ice, featuring Farrell and Arnett that's a minor classic of slapstick. And there are some hilariously accurate touches of details, e.g., a faux-Olympic-village that's almost as hideously ugly as any real one.