? Notwithstanding a
title that makes it sounds like a comedy about a Pop Warner football league,
this is a fairly serious movie about slightly older kids who’ve landed in a
California juvenile detention center. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is a supervisor
at the facility named Sean Porter who gets the idea that some teamwork would
help rehabilitate the young men. The movie was coproduced by Lee Stanley, whose
1993 TV documentary was a basis for this feature. Xzibit plays a fellow
probation officer and assistant coach.
+ Somehow it seems
that the movies I see with the “based on a true story” tag rate a lot higher on
the bullshit meter than many supposedly fictional ones. This is a happy
exception. The movie concentrates on showing how a few key players transform
themselves in the program, as well as Porter’s attempts to push the players
without alienating them. Just as one touchdown won’t win a football game, the
movie never implies that one key moment will make the difference in the
players’ outlook, or even that every player will be rehabilitated. Though some
prison officials express skepticism about the program, they’re not portrayed as
uncaring buffoons. As Porter himself goes through many moods, the Rock
continues to exhibit the range he showed in Be Cool. The
could-have-been-corny parts with the coach’s dying mother even work fairly
well, though I still suspected this storyline to have been made up.
- The basic plot is
one you’ve seen many times, and on those terms the movie offers few surprises.
= ***1/4 Gridiron
Gang overcomes the pitfalls of the underdog sports story by focusing on the
personality of the coach, not unlike the otherwise different Miracle. It’s
a cut above most movies of its type. The documentary clips at the end, which
closely mirror scenes in the fiction version, are a nice touch.
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