Sometimes, filmmakers get so caught up in a clever concept that they try to let the premise alone carry the movie.
This is the case in Leatherheads, in which a fun idea -- a screwball comedy about a 1920s football team -- cannot overcome an underwritten screenplay.
Leatherheads follows the chaotic early days of football before the professional leagues organized the game and made it a national interest. The bleachers are so sparsely filled that they might as well be in a junior high gym, and one game ends in a forfeit because someone runs off with the team's only football.
Veteran player Dodge Connolly (George Clooney) tries to save his bankrupt team by enlisting Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski from The Office), a college player and war hero who can draw huge crowds.
The trailers play up the slapstick on the field and the rapid-fire verbal gymnastics reminiscent of screwball comedies from the '30s and '40s. And, certainly, Clooney and Krasinski, as two extremely likable actors, seem right for the job.
But those screwball comedies thrived off sexual tension, and the romance falls flat. A reporter named Lexie Littleton (Renée Zellweger) is working on a story to show that Rutherford's war record is not as illustrious as it appears. She soon starts to fall for him, however, and this is where the film loses its moral focus and its purpose.
Rutherford is credited with having single-handedly defeated a German platoon. The truth is less glamorous; without spoilers, let it be said that Rutherford simply got a lucky break and, as he points out, sometimes stories are simply retold better and better until they become legends.
As a sports movie, Leatherheads has to end in a big game, so the falsely revered Rutherford signs to another team and has to face his old teammates. Meanwhile, Littleton soon finds herself more interested in Connelly than Rutherford.
The script and Krasinski's acting, however, never make Rutherford seem like anything but a nice kid who got into a bad situation during the war.
It's never clear how the film wants the audience to feel about Rutherford, so there's no reason to root against him.
When Connelly gets the girl and uses trick plays in the big game, it feels as if the movie is missing an antagonist for the crowd to hate.
The silliest moments work the best, such as when Connelly and Littleton escape a speakeasy raid by stealing police uniforms and then jumping out a window onto a trampoline intended for a suicidal man on the ledge below them.
These moments are fleeting, however. Leatherheads is fun as a throwback, but it's more worthwhile as a reminder to go rent an old Clark Gable movie.
Grade: C
