‘Replacements’ Is Merely A Two-Hour Diversion

As a diehard football fan, I could never pan a gridiron movie like The Replacements. However, as a movie fan, I could never endorse a tired, cliché-ridden jumble like The Replacements. Perhaps the best thing that can be said about the film is it’s two hours of mild diversion… if you conveniently ignore the fact that you’ve probably seen this tale, in some shape or form, about a dozen times over.

Gene Hackman stars as flinty coach Jimmy McGinty, who is cajoled out of retirement to helm the Washington Sentinels. With a few more games left in the season, he must try to get the Sentinels into the playoffs for the first time in years. The catch is he has to do this without the team’s stars because the players’ union has gone on strike. Thus, McGinty must assemble a winning team from replacement players, a ragtag collection of misfits he has apparently recruited from the ends of the earth. There’s a Japanese sumo wrestler (Ace Yonamine) turned offensive lineman, a Welsh kicker (Rhys Ifans), a deaf receiver (David Denman), a crazed former cop (Jon Favreau), and a fast-talking, quick-footed wideout, (Orlando Jones of Mad TV and the 7-Up commercials).

The team’s leader is quarterback Shane Falco (Keanu Reeves), a strong-armed gunslinger who never recovered from a Sugar Bowl blowout that marked him as a loser and sent him scurrying to his current job as a barnacle-scraping boat cleaner. Falco is given a second chance by McGinty to reclaim former glories and, as the grizzled coach reveals before the team’s first game, to meld “the man you are and the man you ought to be.”

Hackman knows this underdog territory all too well. He mined it for genuine gold in the much better, more heartfelt rah-rah film Hoosiers. To his credit, he never coasts on cruise control here, and neither do his co-stars. In fact, the movie gains some goodwill from the affability of its stars. Sure, they all predictably bicker, quarrel, snipe and taunt one another with juvenile, crude insults, but you know it’s just the first stop on the long but inevitable journey to team unity. Despite the filmmakers’ insistence on following the worn and well-traveled route to “crowd-pleaser,” the cast at least attempts to serve these cinematic leftovers with a fresh garnish.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of director Howard Deutch, who does little to support his amiable cast. Reeves, coming off The Matrix, is an odd choice to play a professional quarterback (and could have been an inspired choice), but any sense of irony or playful winking must be provided by the audience. Deutch doesn’t appear cognizant of Reeves’ cinematic resumé and therefore fails to see the humor in what could have been the film’s best in-joke. (To Reeves’ credit, he does as he’s told and plays the part in straight-ahead hero mode).

The director also fails to give the movie any sense of subtlety or shading, almost completely avoiding any real discussion of labor issues. Instead of giving the movie some meat by showing the internal conflict some of these players may have had in crossing the picket lines, the movie instead gives us cardboard villains in the striking players, millionaire cry babies who harass and pick on the replacements to such cruel, relentless degree that even the most staunchly pro-union viewer will boo and hiss these one-dimensional baddies.

The Replacements, rated PG-13 for rampant profanity and some crude sexual humor, truly pushes the limits of the tried-but-true “underdog makes good” formula. Surely some viewers will cheer and clap, as many did during my showing, but this manipulative, slightly engaging entertainment is strictly a pretender to loftier, championship level heights.