The Glory Days of Football?

Let's hope not.

Good… not great. Decent. Worth seeing? I wouldn’t say don’t waste your time, but then I wouldn’t tell you to rush out and catch it. Unpredictable, yet in an uninteresting way. Uneven at best.

Leatherheads should have been a funny, whimsical homage to the glory days of football, in the way that Eight Men Out was for baseball, but it failed to deliver. Disappointing considering how much I have enjoyed Clooney’s other directorial efforts.

What the story was about, I almost can’t say. Aging player tries to save a dying sport, only to find it reinvented with no place for his crazy antics? To some degree. War hero and football star, turns out to be less than what the public thinks he is? Sorta. Ragtag pigskin players band together and overcome all odds? Not really, but it seems like that is what they were going for. Unfortunately Leatherheads doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be.

The cinematography was excellent, the writing and directional choices confusing, and the acting adequate. George Clooney is good as always, though this is not his best work. I am as partial to Renee Zellweger as I am to Julia Roberts, and that is to say not at all. Although she’s made a few good flicks, they are rarely good because of her. While her odd mannerisms and quirky nature worked it Nurse Betty, they fail to pan out here. I enjoyed Jennifer Jason Leigh’s hard-nosed reporter in The Hudsucker Proxy much more than I did Zellweger’s interpretation here.

John Krasinski once again proves that he can act, but wasn’t given a whole lot of material to work with. What sounded like it would have been another surefire hit for the Boston boy looks as though it is going to be only other mediocre victory – with this weekend’s box office numbers spelling moderate triumph or doom. It was good to see Jonathan Pryce, who hasn't been in nearly enough, especially in any significant capacity, since Terry Gilliam's classic Brazil.

I was pleased to see the main plot points weren’t tied to all-important games, as has become the standard in sports films, yet at the same time thought there wasn’t enough football. Not enough of the internal strife between the players coming out on the field, and by the time they do employ that mechanic, its almost too late. The end confrontation on the gridiron, between Clooney and Krasinski, should have been fitting and dramatic, but it wasn’t.

Themes are continually touched upon and then abandoned, only to be rekindled to make a point an hour later. Arcs never before made a point of are summarily “resolved” leaving me utterly confused time and again.

There are quite a few laughs, I must say that. Far more than your standard SNL feature film production, yet with a less coherent screenplay. This is not a 30s screwball comedy, though it tries to be at times. There’s a lot of slapstick, some of it successful, some of it not. Where The Good German honored noir classics of the silver screen, while adding something a little harsher, a little different, this one does not do anything for its historical counterparts. Leatherheads doesn’t live up to the films it is trying to honor or emulate, nor the best of its peers that have done so in recent years.