Though I may never understand football, the game, I’ve had a pretty close brush with football, the craze and football, the life. I was once on a train that would pass a famous stadium on a big-game day. From the end of the line where I had boarded, the train was packed with men, women and children in grey, the state favorite’s team color. As it turned out, not everyone was going to the games. Some were in grey by accident, as I was, and the rest merely wished to avoid hostile scrutiny or unabashed suspicion, especially if they happened to wear the opponent team’s colors.
At least one football film hits US screens at the start of every season; many of them major productions. Last year we saw Any Given Sunday (starring Al Pacino); this year apart from The Replacements, there’s Remember The Titans (starring Denzel Washington). I’m trying to say I’ve queued up for quite a few of these for the star-value attraction. I’ve enjoyed them, too, for the mandatory sports action and heart-thumping music that seems the only kind fit to play side by side with brawn and verve.
The Replacements I must place in a, uh, league of its own. The games are not so pretty, but that’s just the point. Producer Dylan Sellers and Director Howard Deutch (Pretty in Pink) based the story loosely on the real National Football League strike of 1987. When the fictional Washington Sentinels lose all the stars to a labor dispute, the owners put together an unlikely replacement team of misfits. Each one is either an amateur, a has-been, or a never-was. Central figure is an all-American quarterback who retired himself after a botched appearance in a long-ago Super Bowl, and proceeded to become a professional plankton scraper. That sounds like a serious character. The rest are listed in the other extreme: a psychotic cop, a butter-fingered retriever (Liberty Heights’ wide-eyed, fast-talking freak Orlando Jones), a deaf-mute, a convict, a cock-eyed preacher, a debt-ridden elbow-bender (played flawlessly, that Welsh screwball what’s-his-name from Notting Hill), even a hard-boiled-egg-popping sumo wrestler.
Orlando Jones is wildly hilarious as a Gloria Gaynor (I Will Survive) zealot. So is the high-kicking Wacky Welshman fueled with beer and nicotine. Gene Hackman as the crusty coach we’d best take from Director Deutch: "He was like a King Arthur sprinkling fairy dust on the set."
Small wonder that Keanu as Shane Falco – the cool, if a bit scared, QB – same across like Lancelot, less the insolence. If the actor was in a major bad-ass mode in The Matrix, as the replacement hero he is every inch the American Dream Boy of All Time. This movie kind of explains the more than 75 websites devoted to the 36-year-old Reeves, who is also bassist of his own band Dogstar. So don’t be surprised at how melodious his booming field foreman voice is.
Thus it takes the football player-shunning cheerleader all of one week to turn 180 degrees. She is especially allergic to quarterback, she tells the smitten Shane at first. But then, looking deep into his eyes while ministering his bruised bod with wild yam ointment in the name of camaraderie, she must have seen everything else that this one could be, if she let him: Little Buddha, Matrix Main Main, Johnny Mnemonic, and Devil’s Advocate, to name a few.
After the season, the replacement team players part ways "without fanfare, or offers a multi-million-dollar endorsements… just a ride home to catch." But, as the coach says in the end, "Greatness, no matter how brief, stays with the man." Fortunately for thoughtful quarterbacks, an enamored cheerleader apparently does, too.