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I’m not sure what if anything to infer from this, but of the most recent football movies -- Varsity Blues, Any Given Sunday, The Waterboy, and this – the two that take the subject seriously (VB and AGS) were about as pleasant as having the person in the theater seat behind you dump ten gallons of iced Gatorade on your head as you and your date seek to rate the efficacy of your best makeout moves during the drowning scene from What Lies Beneath. The other two are goofy, but turn out to be a fair amount of fun.
Does this mean that Oliver Stone and Adam Sandler should trade jobs, or just that moviegoers like seeing a sport dominated by overpaid mounds of steroid-enhanced and hormone-fed jockflesh taken down a notch? I don’t know. Next time I bump into Dennis Miller in the unemployment line I’ll try to remember to get his opinion on the matter.
Until then, suffice it to say that The Replacements -- the movie, not the Minnesota-based punk-pop band, although they’re worth mentioning too – turns out to be biggest movie surprise of the past few weeks. And not just because star Keanu Reeves spends a couple hours onscreen without once saying either “Whoa” or “I know kung-fu.”
Reeves plays Shane Falco, former standout collegiate q.b. who settled down to a lucrative career in boat maintenance after a humiliating Sugar Bowl loss derailed his career and his confidence. Fate decides to intervene, giving him a second chance in the form of an NFL players’ strike. With four games left in the regular season and a playoff spot still attainable, the coach of the fictional Washington Sentinels, Jimmy McGinty (Gene Hackman), decides to gamble on a squad intuitively chosen not for stats but guts. In addition to barnacle-scraper Falco, the highly questionable assemblage of misfits and near-psychos includes a gonzo ex-Gulf War S.W.A.T. cop (Swinger Jon Favreau), a convenience store worker (Orlando Jones, from Magnolia) who stays in shape by chasing down shoplifters, and an artillery-footed soccer yob turned place-kicker (Notting Hill’s Rhys Ifans, who’s once again Welsh but gets much better teeth this time). And that’s not even counting the sumo wrestler, the preacher, and the pseudonymous felon.
Out of this longest yard-sale McGinty tries to fashion winners. What surprises everybody is how badly the subs, described as “more like never-were than has-been,” want to win. And how much the jaded fans appreciate seeing the game played more for passion than a paycheck.
Okay, so it’s not Twelfth Night. The plot is predictable, throwing in a prerequisite romance between Falco and a substitute cheerleader, and the dialogue inflicts a few Maguirisms: “I look at you and see the man you are, and the man you want to be; someday those two are going to meet.” But the workmanlike rendition of an unpretentious, funny story generates laughs without getting too cheap or offensive (or defensive).
Maybe The Replacements succeeds because its offscreen crew is as unlikely as the teaming of Reeves and Hackman. Director Howard Deutch’s resume ranges from a John Hughes cultural milepost (Pretty in Pink) to a couple Matthau-Lemmon sequels (Grumpier Old Men, The Odd Couple II), while writer Vince McKewin wrote one of the best family movies of the last decade, Fly Away Home.
Now, all we need is a worthwhile film about water polo. B-
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