While futbol, a.k.a. soccer, might be the most popular sport in the world, it takes a backseat (heck, it's really several cars back) to professional football, specifically of the National Football League variety. Yet, for all of long-running popularity among Americans, the likes of Jim Brown, Dick Butkus and Sam Huff are ancient history to anyone under the age of 40.
Decades before their glory days, however, the likes of Red Grange, Bronko Nagurski and Don Hutson were becoming the first stars of the gridiron, back in an era when baseball was the king of American sports. With the passage of time and few films about that era in the sport, they've mostly faded into obscurity.
Director and star George Clooney, while purposefully avoiding any sort of biopic vibe by going the fiction route, hopes to change that -- and resurrect the old screwball comedy along the way -- with his release of "Leatherheads." Named for the sort of head gear once worn by players (and you thought concussions were bad nowadays) in an era when it didn't become mandatory until 1943, the film might not win the overall cinematic championship, but it does score enough that it's an entertaining, if overlong and uneven diversion.
With sports films currently a tired and cliché-ridden genre and screwball comedies unbelievably hard to pull off, Clooney and his team clearly had their work cut out for them when devising their game plan. With a script by Duncan Brantley & Rick Reilly, the pic seems to hope to combine (with a lot of artistic license and name and fact alterations) the story of Red Grange (a college standout who helped boost the profile of the fledgling NFL when he turned pro in 1925) with the vibe of a film along the lines of "His Girl Friday" (the 1940 comedy starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, considered by some as one of the best screwball comedies ever made).
Here, Clooney (oft compared to Grant in terms of debonair leading man) and Renée Zellweger do the bickering man/woman thing, while John Krasinski inhabits the Red Grange type part. While the latter only occasionally gets to show his stuff (mainly due to an underwritten role), Clooney is a delight, in full self-deprecating mode. The back and forth banter between him and Zellweger ranges from decent to good, but doesn't consistently sparkle enough to be considered among the best in that particular genre element.
The problem, among several that keep the film from constantly finding the end zone, is that the mix of the two genres (sports drama and screwball comedy for those not keeping score) doesn't always mesh as well as intended. As a result, neither maintains the necessary momentum to make it work without a hitch.
In addition, the shifting of gears between the two sources of material sometimes results in not necessarily an unpleasant grinding noise, but one that's certainly noticeable. Throw in an overlong running time (nearly 2 hours) and various related bits of superfluous material that easily could have stayed on the sidelines, and viewers may end up getting antsy for more scoring long before the clock winds down in the fourth quarter.
Marking his third outing behind the camera, Clooney does some obvious homage to iconic imagery of the sport's early days and players with various monochromatic still images designed to look like the real old thing (some of which provide some decent laughs in their freeze frame mode). And composer Randy Newman decently captures the sounds and moods of the era, although it's more playful and fun rather than profound and stirring as occurred with his previous flashback sports score in "The Natural."
While I would have preferred a better mix of the romantically sardonic banter with the on-field bruising, as well as a final cut that easily could have been 15 to 20 minutes shorter than what currently plays on the screen, there are enough entertaining moments in "Leatherheads" for a final score of 5.5 out of 10.
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