It featured all of the things that augured potential bad news. It had Will Ferrell. It had Will Ferrell in spandex. It had many different people from different countries with different accents. And you know what? It didn't really lean hard into any of those potentially lazy, homophobic, xenophobic crutches. The closest we got to homophobia was a meta joke about how homophobic the Russian government was.
The movie doesn't lean on Ferrell and his physical comedy. It doesn't lean on his Icelandic character's homeland as a punchline. It doesn't even lean on any of the competing nations or stereotypes about those countries to get many cheap jokes.
There is a very good reason for this, actually. Will Ferrell's wife is Swedish, and she introduced him to the real Eurovision contest, which he likes. This movie was meant to be about the main characters, Lars and Sigrit, underdogs trying to compete in this grand event, rather than a parody of the event itself.
Since this was a character study, rather than a nonsensical farce, care was taken in fleshing out the cast. Rachel McAdams and Pierce Brosnan brought character to their Icelandic roles, rather than caricature. Dan Stevens made his Russian antagonist more than his superficial stereotype as he appeared at the beginning of the movie, and made him almost sympathetic by the end of the movie.
One of the surest signs that the movie was an homage and not a satire was the wide range of cameos of previous contestants and winners of Eurovision. Because it was an homage, and rightly featured the tapestry of humanity that has appeared in the contest, the only goofy people could be Ferrell (and to a lesser degree McAdams') characters.
Since a measure of respect was given by Ferrell and company, the movie needed to concentrate on being clever, if a little weird at times, and didn't need to devolve into the tired tropes that Netflix comedies have been emitting. Maybe it's not the best movie that Ferrell has ever made, but it sure is a heck of a lot better than it threatened to be.
