Draft Day (***1/4)

There’ve been all kind of sports films about all kinds of sports, a few of them featuring Kevin Costner. Most have been about players and coaches, but more recently have come those whose focus is what might be called the sports-industrial complex. Jerry Maguire was about an agent; Trouble with the Curve was about a scout, and Moneyball, like this film, was about a general manager. Costner plays Sonny Weaver, the GM of football’s Cleveland Browns, and the entire film unfolds in the course of one day. Featuring virtually no on-field action, it may appeal to fans of game theory as much as sports fans.

Like the real Browns, the ones in the movie are a struggling team with a new coach (Denis Leary). Weaver is under pressure from the owner (Frank Langella) to make a deal that will excite the good folks of Cleveland, where, as his boss puts it, there are no hot babes on roller skates, so the citizens have only the sports teams to give them hope. So when Weaver gets a chance to trade for the number one draft pick, and thus draft the number one college quarterback, it’s a tempting offer. But this will mean antagonizing his coach, giving up future draft picks, and trusting that the quarterback in question will live up to his promise.

In the end, I’m not sure I believed what he ends up doing, but what the film gets right is the uncertainty. That is, Weaver acknowledges that he is only guessing, that no one can know which players will fulfill their early promise and which ones will flame out. This seems like an obvious truth, but so many sports films are about myth-making, with events seeming foreordained, or characters seeming to have magical abilities, as in Trouble with the Curve. Screenwriters Rajiv Joseph and Scott Rothman keep the focus on character and suspense. Director Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters, No Strings Attached) fills the screen with SportsCenter-style graphics, even using frequent split screens, but still keeps the drama on a human level. Paralleling Jerry Maguire, Weaver also has a tentative relationship with a coworker (Jennifer Garner), though this too is portrayed with a low-key realism. And so the film will appeal to those who like stories of people, not just sports.

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viewed 1/18/14 7:00 pm at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and posted

Undefeated (***)

“Football doesn’t build character; football reveals character.” So says Bill Courtney, the volunteer coach for the Manassas Tigers. The Tigers attend a high school with metal detectors at the entrance and live in a depressing, run-down section of North Memphis. This Oscar-winning documentary follows Courtney, in his sixth year as coach, during the course of a season he hopes will lead to the Tigers’ first-ever playoff win. They start off with a loss, so the title is clearly metaphorical, referring to to Courtney’s idea that reacting well to a setback will yield rewards. Three players—roughly, the star, the ex-con, and the smart kid—are used as exemplars of Courtney’s philosophy. The most effective and moving scenes are the ones in which the coach talks to each of them one on one. Courtney doesn’t seem to have any secret to his success on the field—we don’t actually see much in the way of game strategy—except to care about his players. Unfortunately, the players themselves are not interviewed.

The topic mentioned just a few times but pervading the film is race (and class). Coach Courtney and his assistant are white. All of the players are black. It’s inspiring to see them connecting, yet the gulf in the lifestyles of the coach and his family, who live in a nicer house in a nicer neighborhood, and the players, is vast. In one scene, all or nearly all of the players raise their hands when asked if they had someone close to them who was shot. Only indirectly does the film suggest what it’s like to live with the daily threat of violence and the family dysfunction also hinted at. It’s a good, honest, sports documentary, but not a groundbreaking one.

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viewed 3/20/12 7:05 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 3/20/12

Leatherheads (***)

The Game Plan (***)

A narcissistic football star learns to love someone else when a bright-eyed eight-year-old shows up at his door and says she’s his daughter. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson follows the path of other action heroes by trying to broaden his audience with a family comedy. He’s Joe “The King” Kingman, who fancies himself the Elvis of football and keeps a self-portrait on the wall. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop, or Vin Deisel in (ugh) The Pacifier, the King is a reluctant caretaker. Obviously, that will change, but meanwhile, at least, the fart jokes are kept to a minimum and the characters are recognizably human. Joe actually knows hows how to cook and appears to have seen children before, although he’d just as soon not. Meanwhile, the daughter (Disney Channel star Madison Pettis) is as precocious as every other movie child, but quite often seems like a real one. (Johnson is also a better actor than his mesomorphic brethren.)

The ending gets treacly, for sure, but the kids won’t mind. This may not be a movie adults will seek out on their own, but it’s at least one they can take the kids to without feeling embarrassed, bored, or ripped off.

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reviewed 9/30/07

Gridiron Gang (***1/4)

 ? 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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Invincible (***)

? Think of this as a football version of Rocky, only true. Well, sort of, in Disney’s heavily fictionalized story of how Vince Papale (Mark Wahlberg), a down-on-his luck pickup-team player, unexpectedly wound up a 30-year old rookie on his local team, the hapless Philadelphia Eagles of the mid-1970s. Greg Kinnear plays the team’s new coach, Dick Vermeil, and Elizabeth Banks is a romantic interest.

+ Even if Papale’s NFL career was less unlikely than the film makes it seem (the real Papale had played two years in the flop World Football League), the only part of the movie that seemed probably false to me was how his marriage’s end and new romance is timed so coincidentally to his burgeoning football career. The best thing about the movie, though, is the way it evokes the spirit of 1970s Philadelphia at the time, for better or worse. The Veterans Stadium boo birds make multiple appearances, and scrappy working-class South Philly seems just about right, right down to the trash on the street and the nearby picket line. The idea is that the success of the underdog and local boy Papale gave some down-on-their luck people something to rally around. Yet it doesn’t push this theme too hard like, say, Remember the Titans, which I thought laid its “inspirational” message on pretty thick. Banks’s largely made-up role as the down-to-earth girlfriend is appealing and should propel her to greater fame. And BTO’s “Let It Ride” is one of the excellent choices as soundtrack music, a propulsive jock-rock hit that’s been forgotten enough that hearing it really brings back the period.

- Even given that the story is no mystery, the ending is pretty anti-climatic. Although Kinnear is a good Vermeil, the parts with the coach’s family don’t add much to the story. No doubt Vermeil’s life could make a good movie on its own, but what’s here is too insubstantial to amount to much.

= *** Another feel-good sports movie in the vein of The Rookie. Both movies are about modest sports heroes who learn confidence as they meet success. For non-sports fans, there are relatively few play scenes. A lot less corny that than it could have been, it’s inconsequential but entertaining.

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Varsity Blues (***)

This is a lot like Friday Night Lights, which came a few years later. That is to say, it focuses on high school football in a small Texas town. This is less of a downer, though. The coach, played by Jon Voight, is as mean as anyone in the later movie, willingly sacrificing the health of his players, tolerating no challenges to his authority. The hero (James Van Der Beek) is the second-string quarterback, who seems to have talent but irritates the coach because he does things like read books and suggest different plays. His girlfriend (Amy Smart) doesn’t care for football players.

There is some attention paid to the role the game plays in an otherwise dull small town, and to the outsize privileges and attention afforded to its young stars. (The movie’s best-known scene involves Ali Larter’s cheerleader character’s innovative use of whipped cream as a tool for seducing them.) But compared to Friday Night Lights the story is more about the hero’s clashes with the coach and his own morality, less about seeing the town or the coach (an easy villain) as a microcosm of something larger. Still, it’s easy to watch and enjoyable, with Ron Lester’s Billy Bob probably the most compelling supporting character, a 300-pound behemoth who proves the most fragile of the players.

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viewed 1/99 at Moorestown; re-viewed 01/30/10 on television; reviewed 1/31/10