Let’s get one thing straight before I start this review: I hate football movies and I hate football T.V. shows. My hatred stems from these two things:
1) The on-field action is never realistic. Ever. This gets my goat like no other. The movies take the sacred art of football and diarrhea all over it. No one gets dragged down, no one goes for anyone’s legs. One guy can run down the field knocking people down like a truck instead of drive blocking or screening them off like in real life. Situations like down and distance are always ignored. There’s always WAY too much bullshitting going on in the huddle. Someone tell Keanu there’s a 15 yard penalty for taking off your helmet. And how did he get the play call in? Oh, and you know the last scene in Any Given Sunday where Willie Beamen runs up the pile and jumps in for the winning touchdown? Completely illegal. They would lose the game and deservedly so for insulting my intelligence.
2) The best part about football (and all sports) is that it’s unscripted. It’s easy to WRITE about a scrappy gang of misfits getting together and winning the big game, but 100 times better when it happens in real life. Expert predictions in the NFL and college football are always proven wrong. I could expertly predict the ending to any football movie about 10 minutes in.
Don’t get me wrong, there are snippets in football movies that get to me. This is pretty awesome. And the music in this scene is amazing. The slow clap in Lucas-starring-Corey Haim? Nothing short of Epic. Lattimer may be the greatest character in movie history. And I always chuckle when I think of a high school friend of mine and his impression of Willie Beeeeeeeamen. The key to enjoying football movies is to pick your moments.
The Program and Any Given Sunday are okay because they are so over-the-top. It’s the unintentional comedy factor pulled off brilliantly. The clichéd dialogue, the stereotyped characters, the ridiculous pump-up scenes…all great to laugh at but terrible nonetheless. Heartwarming based-on-a-true story movies like Invincible and Rudy are also okay because the focus is on one character overcoming odds or some shit.
But THIS movie…this movie takes the cake. It was unwatchable. It fell somewhere in between the two watchable types of football movies, getting caught in a no-man’s land of suck. Not exaggerated enough to be like the Program, not heart-warming at all, and just plain not funny. How do you take Jason Bateman and make him suck so hard?
There are only four redeeming things about the movie. A) The ensemble cast. The “oh it’s THAT guy” moments pretty much got me through. Although, it’s funnier to just think of all these people in a movie together than to actually see them interacting and reciting from this terrible script. B) Rob Schneider as the announcer. Some of his stuff was actually pretty funny (I hope you stay tuned as the Texas State marching band does its salute to gun racks and open beverage containers), but really I just like to laugh at Rob Schneider. He also did his “fumblerooski, fumblina” etc. schtick from SNL, which was amusing in its patheticness. C) The mascot. That fucking armadillo costume is awesome.
and D) Kathy Ireland is in it.
The rest of the movie is so apathetic it doesn’t even qualify as sucky. It’s just…there. The sub-plots are ridiculous (we’re 0-7 coach…what do we do? I know! Lets get a girl soccer player to quit her legitimate sport and join our terrible football team as a kicker! Also, let’s make the fat kids do aerobics!), the factual errors glaring (they have 14 players on the team playing ironman football and not a single one of them gets injured in a nine game season? The girls’ locker room is all the way across campus from the guys’ locker room? A four time nation champion plays in a stadium that holds 14,000 people?) and the ending WAY too predictable (they beat an undefeated team on a *GASP* trick play 2 point conversion!?!) At least Necessary Roughness does us the common courtesy of rolling the credits right after the game.
In short this movie is awful. Stay away from it like a smoldering diaper full of herpes-infected babyfood shit.
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