Fumble Recovery
FILM: The Replacements
DIRECTOR: Howard Deutch
STARRING: Keanu Reeves, Gene Hackman
GRADE: B-
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HEAD COACH JIMMY MCGINTY (GENE HACKMAN) AND QUARTERBACK SHANE FALCO (KEANU
REEVES) OVERCOME OBSTACLES AND POOR FILM STRUCTURE IN THE SURPRISINGLY FUNNY
THE REPLACEMENTS.
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Yes, I'm worried that this long, awful summer at the movies has destroyed my
critical judgment. I feel like a hobo reduced to pawing through refuse bins for
edible food. Last week, I was offering up a half-eaten but thankfully unspoiled
sandwich called Space Cowboys. And now I'm back this week with a
wedge of discarded lettuce called (with my own irony appended): The
Replacements.
Written by Vince McKewin and directed by Howard Deutch, The
Replacements is loosely based on the 1987 National Football League players'
strike, though the setting would seem to be the current day. You might remember
that 1987 season, the first one in which the Saints made the playoffs. The
Saints' record that year was 12-3, and two of the 12 games were won by
strike-breaking replacement players, quarterbacked by New Orleans local John
Fourcade, who went on after the strike to make the regular roster and for a
while even supplanted Bobby Hebert as the starter. Out of this context,
remembered fairly vividly by most football fans, McKewin and Deutch have
fashioned a comedy that's surprisingly long on laughs while fairly short on
either narrative surprise or football accuracy.
The story in The Replacements goes like this: along with all
the other players in the league, the Washington Sentinels go on strike for
higher wages and benefits. As one player explains his teammates' concerns,
"Hey, man, you know what insurance costs these days on a Ferrari?" Well, the
hard-drinking, always conniving team owner (the always-wonderful Jack Warden)
is not going to take this strike lying down, not when three wins gets his
franchise into the playoffs for the first time in seven years. So, we gather,
he fires his coach (we don't see him do this, but he does hire a new one) and
hires Jimmy McGinty (Gene Hackman), an old fire breather of the Vince Lombardi
take-no-prisoners school.
McGinty sets about straight away to assemble a new team, as he
must, from scratch. For offensive linemen, he hires a couple of homeboys who
are terrors together and can't bear to be apart. He supplements the Jackson
brothers (Faizon Love and Michael Taliferro) with a sumo wrestler (Ace
Yonamine) who loves to scarf a dozen or so hard-boiled eggs as a pre-game
snack. A couple of other helmets appear in the line part of the huddle, but
they never get either faces or names. For tight end, he selects a deaf guy
(David Denman) to provide some moments of help-the-handicapped humor. For wide
receiver, McGinty chooses a convenience store security guard who can outrun
anyone but can't catch the ball when he gets there. In the tradition of Ray
Nitschke and Dick Butkus, he hires a psychopath for a middle linebacker (Jon
Favreau playing completely against type, and effectively so), and for
placekicker he imports Nigel Gruff (Rhys Ifans), a zany Welshman with the
physique of a piece of cold linguine, the training habits of Dean Martin and
the leg of Superman.
And, of course, for quarterback he recruits a reluctant hero, Shane
Falco (Keanu Reeves, who, as unlikely as it seems, actually convinces you he's
player), a once-promising college arm with the reputation of folding under
pressure. Will this team come together? Will it rise to the occasion? Will it
overcome setbacks? Will it make the playoffs? Well, if you don't know the
answer to that question, then you've never been to a sports movie.
Does all of this work? Not by a long shot. This is not remotely
Bull Durham or Breaking Away, not Rudy or
Hoosiers. This is not even The Longest Yard or North
Dallas Forty. It is, however, an effective football version of Major
League. Zany characters populate every frame, and writer McKewin has
delivered a handful of scenes that produce moments of sustained hilarity. I
laughed more often and harder at this film than I have at any other all
summer.
I might pause to complain that the romance the script tries to
develop between Shane and fetching head cheerleader Annabelle Ferrell (Brooke
Langton) is astonishingly lame. Out of the blue in the late going, the picture
seems to suggest a three-way romantic rivalry involving regular quarterback
Eddie Martell (Brett Cullen, who looks a whole lot more like Bret Maverick than
Brett Favre). However, without Annabelle, we wouldn't get the cheerleader
tryouts (don't ponder the lunacy of the cheerleaders having gone on strike,
too) and performances and the repeated laughs they deliver.
In the end, I really complain only that Deutch and McKewin seem not
to realize that football teams have second strings. We know exactly what's
going to happen in the last game's waning minutes, but it's just plain annoying
to have to endure the notion that a player who loses his position as a starter
is thrown off the team altogether. Have these guys never heard of Earl Morral,
who stepped in for an injured Johnny Unitas and earned the NFL's MVP honors in
1968, or Frank Reich, who took over for an injured Jim Kelley and led the
Buffalo Bills to the greatest playoff game comeback in NFL history? For cripe's
sake, have they never heard of Kurt Warner, who filled a quarterback void when
Trent Green got hurt and steered the Rams to a Super Bowl title -- last
year!
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