3 stars

The Eurovision Song Contest scheduled for May this year was cancelled due to you know what, so all the fans around the world will have to make do with this instead. Trigger warning: Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga stars Will Ferrell, and he is not to everyone's taste.

It's hard to keep a good man down, but seems it's even harder to keep a dogged comedian from the fun he has dead-panning and making a mug of himself. How did this movie happen? Ferrell has been a long-time devotee of Eurovision which he was apparently introduced to by his Swedish wife. So, there's some truth to Lars Erickssong, the character he plays, who has wanted to compete in the Euro-pop extravaganza since he was a kid.

Little Lars got hooked in 1974 when the Swedish supergroup ABBA had their famous win with their song "Waterloo". He saw them win on TV when he was at his father's local in the northerly Icelandic town of Husavik. Pierce Brosnan plays Lars' dad Erick Erickssong, and he does looks positively resplendent in a long chestnut wig.

That was the 1970s, and this is now. Lars is getting on, he is middle-aged and has a pretty bad case of "failure to launch". His widowed father would prefer that he left home and got a real job on a boat, like the long line of fishermen that he comes from. His would-be girlfriend and partner in the duo Fire Saga, Sigrit Ericksdottir (Rachel McAdams), would like that too.

We can see that Sigrit could love Lars to kiss her. It's one of the film's weak running jokes that he has plenty of opportunities but he doesn't, and that people often mistake the pair for brother and sister. "She's probably not my sister." Probably? You can never be entirely sure in a small town like Husavik, nor with an old ladies' man like Erick for a dad. One wonders what the people of Iceland, home to wonderful composers and musicians like Bjork and Sigur Ros, make of these caricatures.

Like many of Ferrell's characters, Lars is an inhibited, awkward fumbler, probably somewhere on the spectrum, with a preoccupation with the indices of manliness. I reckon this should have produced a better line in risque penis jokes than it has.

Casting McAdams as Sigrit was an inspired choice. She is such a warm, animated presence on screen. Here she offsets the wooden Ferrell comedic style which, in my opinion, is far better suited to the TV skit territory of Saturday Night Live from whence he came. Predictably when Lars and Sigrit compete for the opportunity to represent Iceland with their song "Double Trouble", their act unravels on stage. Not for the reasons we might expect, though. Lars in white catsuit and fluffy outsized apres-ski boots, and Sigrit with huge angel wings attached, are just the ticket for Eurovision, but it's the technology that lets them down.

Things go much worse for the winning contingent. The boat where the after-party takes place explodes and everyone is lost, including Iceland's newly endorsed official Eurovision entrant. Despite massive misgivings, the organising committee have to send Lars and Sigrit, who have qualified by default, instead.

At the Eurovision venue in Edinburgh, the movie gets an instant boost as new characters enter the frame. Here, the Eurovision Song Contest shoot was taking place at the actual event, in 2018. If you think you spotted past winners and runners-up flit by, like Conchita, Jamala or Alexander Rybak, you most probably did.

With lacklustre writing from Ferrell, and indulgent direction from David Dobkin (Wedding Crashers, and not a lot else), Eurovision Song Contest was in the doldrums until the flamboyant Russian entrant, Alexander Lemtov, appeared on screen. Played by English actor Dan Stevens, the Russian is a man who is everything that Lars is not. So it's Lemtov, a support character, who succeeds in bringing the movie back to life during a long and uneven two hours. He also succeeds in turning Sigrit's head with his performance of "Lion of Love" which makes him the competition favourite.

It's ironic that Ferrell's character had little to add and that his movie would have done better without him.