leatherheads fails to score
Football goes screwball in 1920s-set romantic comedy
Leatherheads: The idea and the ads are promising indeed.
In the mid-1920s, professional football was little more than a mud-caked joke, with sparse crowds and renegade players. I’m laughing already. Add George Clooney as an aging athlete, John Krasinski as a collegiate gridiron stud and Renee Zellweger as the cutie-pie reporter they both admire and it sounds like a cinch. Well, not so fast.
Sure, the trailer has a few good gags, but the rest of the movie seems to have a hard time sustaining that comic feel. Clooney, who also directed, obviously intends to emulate the classic screwball comedies of the ’30s, but writers Duncan Bradley and Rick Reilly can’t keep up that kind of pace, and we’re left with strained little quarrels and lackluster game sequences to fill the gaps.
Randy Newman’s ragtime score is a winner, and sporadic laughs are easily evident, but this effort is neither a grand romantic comedy nor a satisfying sports spoof.
We give it a C+
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