George Clooney is no Howard Hawks. Shock, I know. Worse, he's no Ron Shelton either.
Thus Leatherheads, which Clooney stars in and directs, emerges as neither as artful as the 1930s and 1940s comedies it aches to recall (among them Hawks' His Girl Friday) nor as scrappily entertaining as Shelton's modern sports-and-sex romp Bull Durham. At last, it's a movie both you and your grandparents can sleep through.
Clooney, you have may gleaned from a magazine cover or two, has cultivated an image as a time-capsuled throwback to Old Hollywood.
It's a rep bolstered by his affection for period material: Good Night, and Good Luck, with its smoke-choked, black-and-white cinematography; the problematic The Good German with its overpowering artifice; even the Ocean's Eleven capers which, for all their hipster bearing, are steeped in the joshing style of Frank Sinatra's rat pack.
Yet with Leatherheads, Clooney can't quite decide what he wants to make. A retro screwball comedy? A romance? A rough-and-tumble underdogs farce? A parable about how we invent our heroes?
Depending on which 10 minutes you're sitting through, it's all of the above. And the result, while intermittently amusing, never hits its stride.
Set in 1925 when professional football was dwarfed in popularity by the college game, it stars Clooney as Dodge Connelly, an aging pro from the Duluth Bulldogs faced with career extinction.
To save his league and himself -- as a scene in an unemployment office makes clear, he's really not qualified to do anything else -- he woos Princeton superstar Carter (The Bullet) Rutherford (John Krasinski) to join his rag-tag team in the hopes of attracting spectators.
So far, so good, and the first chunk of Leatherheads moves along promisingly enough. But Clooney, working from a script co-written by Sports Illustrated's Rick Reilly, quickly becomes bogged down in needless subplots, alarming shifts in tone and perfunctory characters.
For example, it's fine when Renee Zellweger turns up as Lexie Littleton, a snappy, spirited reporter assigned with investigating whether Rutherford (Krasinski) is genuinely the war hero he claims to be.
Just as it's fine, if improbable, when she winds up torn between the affable all-American Carter and the rakish Dodge.
But did we really need the battlefield flashbacks, press conferences, newsroom politics, bureaucrats and ... hey, wait, wasn't this a football movie?
Moreover, just as the screenplay could have used a stricter director, so too could have the performances.
Clooney is always an agreeable enough lead, but here he mistakes mugging for characterization. Zellweger, as the kind of lippy heroine epitomized by Rosalind Russell, is miscast in a role that demands snark, not sleepy-eyed sweetness. And Krasinski's big-screen potency remains a question mark.
If his low-key naturalism works so well in the confines of The Office, here it registers about as compellingly as wallpaper.
Even the mud-caked football finale, arriving about 30 minutes too late, fails to muster much excitement.
Like the rest of Leatherheads, for all its slapstick antics and period detail, it's bloodless, pretty boring and more than a bit of a mess.
(This film is rated PG)
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