THE REPLACEMENTS
Rated PG-13 - Running Time: 1:58 - Released 8/11/00
It's amazing to me how consistently predictable sports comedies
are. Everyone knows how a film like The Replacements is
going to turn out after the first five minutes, just like we know
it for Major League or The Mighty Ducks. Even Oliver
Stone's self-indulgent football opera of last year, Any
Given Sunday, was predictable, and it took itself much
more seriously than this. The Replacements, written by
Vince McKewin (Fly Away Home) and directed by Howard Deutch
(Grumpier Old Men), definitely does not take itself
seriously; in fact it seems to suffer from a conflict in tone.
While quarterback Keanu Reeves and coach Gene Hackman see themselves
in a serious drama about second chances, most of the supporting
cast, under Deutch's orders, are going for the kind of silly comedy
we saw in a hundred Burt Reynolds films in the '70s (like The
Longest Yard, for instance). Still, for some reason, we watch,
we root, we cheer, we get excited for the team. It's fluff, but
it's watchable fluff.
In this year's underdog-team-makes-good story, the premise
stems from a situation all too familiar in pro sports: a players'
strike. When the nation's pro players suspend the season, demanding
an increase in their $5 million salary cap, Washington Sentinels
owner O'Neill (Jack Warden) seeks out his old coaching buddy Jimmy
McGinty (Hackman) to organize a team of replacement players to
finish the season. If the team wins three of its remaining four
games, it goes to the playoffs. Jimmy agrees under the conditions
that he be allowed total control and that he gets to choose the
players.
His first choice is Shane "Footsteps" Falco (Reeves),
a promising college QB who choked in the last minute of the Sugar
Bowl in 1987 and has since disappeared. In addition to Falco,
Jimmy recruits a motley crew of supporting players, including
a former Navy Seal who tackles anything he sees, especially if
it's wearing red (Jon Favreau), a Welsh soccer star kicker (Rhys
Ifans), a runner who can't catch (Orlando Jones), a receiver who
can't hear (David Denman), and a couple of phat gangstas (Faizon
Love, Michael Taliferro) and a Japanese sumo wrestler (Ace Yonamine)
as linemen. Meanwhile, the Sentinels' head cheerleader and Reeves's
love interest (Brooke Langton, Melrose Place) recruits
a bunch of strippers (is the cheerleaders' union on strike too?),
whose style substitutes raw sex appeal for team spirit.
The first time we see Keanu Reeves, he is just getting up,
yawning, looking like he had a particularly hard night. The trouble
is, he acts that way for the duration of the film. Attempting
to endow his character with a sullen determination, he simply
looks like he's not had enough sleep. Hackman is adequate as always,
superior to the material, really. As the team struggles through
its final four regular season games, each with a predictable outcome,
its members grow, develop cameraderie, engage in various hijinks,
have altercations with the striking pro players (led by Brett
Cullen as the cocky quarterback), and eventually, inevitably,
become a team. In between the game sequences, which feature not
only the playing but generous doses of the cheerleaders' R-rated
cheering, there is the romance between Reeves and Langton. Although
she carries a sweet simple sexiness about her, Reeves is unable
to make much of a spark.
Guest appearances by Pat Summerall and John Madden, as themselves, lend a touch of authenticity to this romp, but The Replacements is mainly just boys-will-be-boys silliness set to the strains of Gloria Gaynor's popular-of-late movie anthem "I Will Survive." ***½