Mainstream Hollywood has a history of criminally under-using valuable resources. While the comedian Will Ferrell is not quite as recognisable a brand as the Fantastic Four, after the success of Elf and Anchorman he’s certainly not far off. However his latest film, Kicking and Screaming, ignores the riffing, freeform silliness and boundless improvisational skills that make Ferrell great. Instead it reduces his comedic performance to a series of shots of Ferrell being hit in various parts of his anatomy with a football and pulling his hilariously pained “Oof” face.

Ferrell plays a well-meaning but clueless dad who is recruited to coach his son’s little league American football team. It’s a job that reanimates a whole changing room full of childhood skeletons. A lifetime of humiliations at the hands of his ultra-competitive father (Robert Duvall), the coach of a rival team, means he finds it hard to keep this contest all about harmless fun.

Just about every lazy “triumph of the underdog” sporting movie cliché you could think of turns up in the script, and the film is further spoilt by the overacting that results from a combination of ambitious little stage school show-offs and too much sugar-rich snack food. Oof, indeed.

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