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| The ball takes some bad bounces in 'Leatherheads’ | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| By Craig Outhier, Get Out | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| April 3, 2008 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
Sorry to fixate on the costumes, but then, costume design is the one thing that goes right in this dull, low-stakes scramble of pathos and screwball. Clooney, as director and star, nails the look, but calls one bad broken play after another. Looking unmistakably Gablesque with his rakish shock of umber hair and leather riding jacket, Clooney plays Jimmy “Dodge” Connelly, star player and de facto head coach of the pro football Duluth Bulldogs. Admittedly, that makes Dodge sound a lot more impressive than he actually is. Owned by Minnesota’s “starch king,” the Bulldogs play to empty bleachers and will soon fold. Nobody watches pro football, see? It’s a totally different story in the college game, where star Princeton halfback Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski from TV's “The Office”*) — a war hero, no less — plays to packed stadiums and adoring crowds. Seeing a business opportunity, Dodge buys the Bulldogs and recruits Carter to play for him, liberally greasing the kid’s money-grubbing agent (Jonathan Pryce, in a thankless and uninteresting bad-guy role) along the way. Dodge’s ploy also puts him in the romantic orbit of Lexie Littleton (Renee Zellweger), a tart-tongued newspaper reporter from Chicago assigned to punch holes in Dodge’s war hero story. It’s seems like a natural, high-friction pairing — the dashing, rule-flouting athlete vs. the guarded, whip-smart feminist — and maybe that’s the problem. Screenwriters Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly (the former Sports Illustrated columnist, making his scripting debut) are content to let the archetypes speak for themselves. When Clooney and Zellweger go at each other, they do so with little passion and depressingly blunt witticisms, despite Lexie’s dropping of a self-flattering Dorothy Parker reference. You wish, sister. (Zellweger’s performance feels like a pale reflection of her Oscar-winning, period-oriented work in “Chicago.”) The movie just gets more disordered and ineffectual from there, veering from wacky, Keystone-style buffoonery (in a painfully misjudged speak-easy scene) to Carter’s semi-serious wartime reveries (Krasinski’s performance is about as interesting as a three-and-out) to the anticlimactic “big game” that has no bearing on anything, least of which who gets the girl. After his spot-on salute to yesteryear journalism in “Good Night, and Good Luck,” Clooney attempts to sketch the birth/demise another American institution, but ends up punting. Correction: A prior version of this story misidentified one of Krasinski's acting credits. Return to the corrected sentence. REVIEW ‘Leatherheads’Cast: George Clooney, Renee Zellweger, John Krasinski Behind the scenes: Directed by George Clooney, from a script by Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly Rating: PG-13 (brief strong profanity), 114 min. — Grade: D+ Contact Craig Outhier by email, or phone (480) 898-5683 |
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