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Review: “Leatherheads”
By Kyle | April 6, 2008
LET’S GET READY TO FUMBLE
Kyle Smith review of “Leatherheads”
Watching “Leatherheads” is like going to a football game and watching the players bring desks and paperwork onto the field. How boring is this movie? I’ve been more entertained by halftime shows.
The first hour is a pleasant-enough retro comedy set in 1925, when college football drew 40,000 spectators and pro football was watched by cows. George Clooney, who also directed the film from a script co-written by Sports Illustrated’s longtime columnist Rick Reilly, plays a pro player from Duluth scrambling to save his league, and his job. (When he puts on a suit and takes an interview with a human-resources lady, she asks him what his skills are. He can’t think of a response.) There are some laughs in the scenes in which the actors put on leather helmets and goof around on the field; a kicker so off-target that the ball winds up in the tuba.
The Clooney figure thinks hiring the pride of the Princeton tigers, the Bullet (John Krasinski), for an unearthly sum will put his league on the map, but as he coaxes the Bullet to the pros, a Chicago Tribune reporter (Renee Zellweger) sniffs around the younger man because of a rumor that his tale of WW I heroism has some holes in it.
Zellweger gives a grating rendition of the smart-mouthed girl reporter played by the likes of Rosalind Russell and Katharine Hepburn back in the day and more recently by Jennifer Jason Leigh in “The Hudsucker Proxy.” Zellweger’s presence in the film is a mystery. She never gave off a lot of sexual heat in the first place, and now she’s 15 years too old to be flirting with Krasinski (and Clooney, who plays the kind of rake unlikely to date in his age group). Her squinty facial expressions have become unbearable to the point where you want someone to come in and prop her eyelids open with toothpicks. Moreover, her scenes with Clooney are like trying to watch somebody light a wet match. They fire high-speed wordplay at one another, some of which is funny (and a lot of which isn’t) but never seem to be fighting off an attraction.
Clooney also isn’t much of a comic actor and his efforts to channel Clark Gable–who was solid in comedy as well as drama–made me wince. Gable was always cooler than his material, winking at the script, but Clooney wallows around with schtick and bug-eyed facial expressions to try to claw up a laugh. If the director had been anyone else, he would have told his star to tone it down, but Clooney seems to think that 1930s comedies–misleading labeled “screwball comedies,” though they depended almost entirely on verbal wit–were about buffoonery. Clooney hasn’t mugged this much since his hideous performance in “O Brother Where Art Thou.”
In the second half, the WWI subplot takes over the movie, though it doesn’t much matter and it doesn’t reflect badly on the Krasinski character (who if anything comes off seeming more likable when the truth is known). Scene after scene features dull squabbling and newspaper chatter about the details, and when we finally do get back to the field for one more game there are no particular stakes and not much happens except that all of the players get covered with mud.
This climactic battle has all the intensity of an exhibition match. It’s so boring that we keep cutting away to the press box for a flat running gag about swearing in front of an open microphone. The announcers are as flabbergasted as we are that the movie is ending so meekly. As one of them says, “We have a muddy snoozefest.”
April 1st, 2008 at 5:02 pm
[...] the field. How boring is this movie? I’ve been more entertained by halftime shows. — Kyle Smith « An Array of Prom Night Pictures [...]
April 6th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Clooney has made great strides as an actor. Now, he’s simply mediocre, but his marquee good looks put him over the top as far as Hollywood is concerned. I admire his ambition, though. He certainly doesn’t repeat himself.
April 7th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
I have ZERO desire to see this movie. I mean, why watch it? Why? I’m tired of Clooney. Renee Zelwegger? Come on, please. That kid from The Office? what a waste of time.
April 7th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
Clooney’s endless mugging just about drove me to yell, “Just say the damn line!” at the screen. The big doey eyes, the slight wobble to the head, the subtle slag in the jaw that pulls up into a grin, the faux turn of the head before the actual turn when - he asks someone to pass him the salt. Geezus. Stop mugging and actually edit in some content in those wasted 20 minutes. Plus, he was so too old and unathletic for the role it was ridiculous. And how ’bout that fist fight full of roundhouses to the face for seemingly a half-an-hour, and not a cut lip, black eye, or missing incisor to be seen.