Leatherheads
Part screwball, love-triangle romance, part sports comedy, George Clooney's third film behind the camera, the period piece Leatherheads, tells the story of American professional football's "salad days," and one man's very self-interested attempts to push it into the public view. Loose-limbed, loquacious and exceedingly affable, the movie checks off many of the boxes of its genre forebears, but comes totally unglued in the final third, when forced to awkwardly try to pay off its tangled inducements.
When his Duluth Bulldogs finish their latest barnstorming tour broke and out of opponents to play, wily, charming owner-player Dodge Connolly (Clooney) turns his attention toward figuring out a scheme to keep alive his dream of avoiding a real job. A jack-of-all-trades who even dictates grand post-game reports to the local reporter, the rakish Dodge sets his sights on wooing into the fold a wealthy investor, C.C. Frazier (Jonathan Pryce).
Frazier's latest business client is golden-boy Carter "The Bullet" Rutherford (John Krasinski), a Princeton student, football star and war hero who, legend has it, single-handedly forced an entire German squadron to surrender during service in World War I. What Dodge doesn't originally know, but quickly finds out, is that hotshot, tart-tongued reporter Lexie Littleton (Renée Zellweger), ostensibly there for a fluff profile piece, has in fact been sent by her editor to craft a take-down article on Carter, whose war story they don't believe. As Lexie gets close to Carter, so too does Dodge to Lexie. Powered by Carter's stardom, the team is revitalized, but for how long?
Leatherheads' screenplay, an old piece penned in the early 1990s by sports magazine writers Rick Reilly and Duncan Brantley, and presumably tinkered with by Clooney and a number of uncredited script doctors, wallows, to largely winning effect early on, in detail (the team having to forfeit a game because of the lack of a ball, and drying laundry on the outside of a moving train) and dialogue. Great fun is had in mocking Clooney as a "middle-aged boy wonder," and the actor-director and Zellweger share a number of enjoyable, rapid-fire exchanges, their just-concealed attraction masked by surface irritation.
But Leatherheads' third act is about as muddy as the action on the field. A few sequences (an energetic bar-room brawl, for instance) seem thrown in merely for affectation, while most others are rife with wan obligation. There are no sharp angles here, no clear delineation of motives, particularly as it relates to Dodge's feelings about Carter, whom he knows Lexie is angling to take down and yet whom he needs as a public draw for his own financial survival.
That might be fine if Leatherheads made a few different narrative choices, and just wholeheartedly embraced existence as a ramshackle character piece. The problem is that the film also tries to capture the transitional phase of a sport moving from an independent and inherently irresponsible endeavour to a corporate-backed game with rules and regulations. It does this nicely in a few shorthand visual ways, but awkwardly as applied to its characters. For a movie so invested in whimsy and tone to finally end with a conventional "big game" feels disingenuous at best, and even more tacked on given the lack of concrete stakes tied to the outcome.
If the story winds down in disappointing fashion, the role of Dodge is never less than a perfect fit for Clooney, who pulls out his Cheshire cat grin to twinkly, mischievous effect. Yet Clooney the director also does quite right by his other actors, drastically reducing, if not entirely eliminating, Zellweger's penchant for squinting, and guiding Krasinski (the small screen American version of The Office) through his best big screen role and performance to date.
Technically, Leatherheads is Clooney's most ambitious film thus far behind the camera, and he and his collaborators ably deliver on all counts. There's a warmth to the cinematography of Newton Thomas Sigel (Three Kings, X-Men) and a smart, simple, inviting sense of detail to Jim Bissell's production design, which ranges in scale from intimate (starch, toothpaste and shaving cream ads featuring Carter's grinning visage) to the massive scope of an Ennis Field practice and game, abetted by a few nice effects shots. Randy Newman's horn-waggling, tin-pan alley score, meanwhile, serves as optimistic, ironic counterpoint to the hard-knock economic realities so many of the Duluth footballers face. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here.
Superhero Movie
For the most part a dispiriting, tedious send-up of superhero origin story clichés, Superhero Movie starts out with a full head of steam but quickly flags, struggling to fill out both its costume and its running time. Like the worst of its downmarket, quick-buck spoof brethren, the film isn't so much a satire or even clever re-contextualization of well-worn story threads as it is clamorous regurgitation, with just more flatulence jokes.
Despite opening at 300 more theaters than ensemble blackjack picture 21, Superhero Movie, which didn't screen in advance for critics, placed third for the weekend, ringing up an estimated $9.4 million at just over 2,960 venues. That total was well off the pace of fellow genre spoofs Meet the Spartans and Epic Movie, which each grossed more than double that amount en route to final domestic tallies in the high $30 millions. Seemingly a rare case of a proper snap judgment by the marketplace at large, Superhero Movie will eke out the bulk of the rest of its modest earnings via pay-cable and ancillary outlets.
Modeled around Spider-Man, with a pinch of Batman's parents' deaths as an extra source of "motivation," the film's story centers around Rick Riker (Drake Bell, of TV's Drake & Josh), a gangly high school student who lives with his aunt and uncle and nurses a crush on his knockout next-door neighbor, Jill Johnson (Sara Paxton). After being bitten by a genetically altered bug on a school field trip, Rick finds himself blessed with superpowers, and caught up in a life of crime-fighting as Dragonfly. Naturally, his path crosses with Lou Landers (Christopher McDonald), the uncle of a classmate and the terminally ill CEO of a pharmaceuticals company who tests out a new drug invention and develops a maniacal, bloodthirsty alter ego.
One doesn't head to a spoof like Superhero Movie for artful interplay or newly tilled narrative terrain, but the laugh quotient here feels especially padded, and the film needs an extended, very slow crawl of closing credit outtakes to even crack the 80-minute mark. Some of the bigger names in the movie, featured prominently on the poster (Pamela Anderson, Craig Bierko, Simon Rex) are reduced to single-scene appearances of far less than a minute, while others (Tracy Morgan) seem to play characters whose comic potential is not fully tapped.
Writer-director Craig Mazin did script duty on the last two Scary Movie flicks (in addition to Senseless and RocketMan), so he in theory knows about both stitching referential jokes together and tailoring material for specific stars. His script here, though, seems designed to have garnered an initial production green light, and little more. After the first 20 to 25 minutes (i.e., roughly all that would have been scrutinized by some studio executives), funny scene ideas (like Dragonfly bumping into another superhero at his new rooftop brooding spot) are either dashed through in unfulfilled fashion or discarded altogether, in favor of goosing, arguably topical spoofs of public figures, like Stephen Hawking, Barry Bonds and Nelson Mandela.
Back in the director's chair for the first time since 2000's independently produced superhero spoof The Specials, Mazin evidences no great skill one way or another. To his nominal credit, he doesn't solely reference other movies, and he does endeavor to work in a number of visual gags to supplement the writing. The mad-dash pace, though, wrecks Superhero Movie, along with slapstick sequences with no lasting (or even immediate) consequences.
As for performances, Bell is passable but somewhat unmemorable as the lead, unlike the great find of the Scary Movie series, Anna Faris, whose wide-eyed blitheness radiated a charm that announced a bubbly new comedic presence — something her subsequent turns in Lost in Translation, Just Friends and Smiley Face would confirm. Seeing Nielsen here, though, only whets one appetite for a rental of Naked Gun or Police Squad! Special note, meanwhile, goes out to Miles Fisher, who nails the vocal intonations of Tom Cruise in his parody of a sit-down interview with the star.
Technical credits are for the most part adequate, with James L. Venable's opening score providing a credible appropriation of manufactured comic book-style emotional uplift. Likewise, Bob Ziembicki's budget production design does a capable job of subtly, smartly recreating spaces from the Spider-Man, X-Men and Batman franchises. On the downside, a cash infusion for some more effects work would have given the movie a slickness that it's missing, and one that any real spoof of the superhero genre seemingly demands. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (MGM/Weinstein Company, PG-13, 85 minutes)