Leatherheads



Directed by
George Clooney

Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly want to do retro. Clearly, they are enamored of the comedies of Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant.  But these two people are long dead and they had to settle for George Clooney and Renee Zellweger, which if you think about it, isn't all that bad.

Once upon a time the National Football League was a ragtag affair, with teams folding and players having to have day jobs. That much is true, but the rest of it's pure fiction. This is the story of the Duluth Bulldogs, and how they saved pro football from the dustbin of history.

Dodge Connolly(Clooney), the quarterback and assistant coach of the team is down on his luck. The Bulldogs are about to go belly up, and with no real skills to fall back on, he has to something desperate.

College football is far more popular than the pros, and the hero of the day is Carter Rutherford(John Krasinski), who was famous for getting an entire German platoon to surrender during the First World War and is brilliant at everything he does. So our hero goes off to Chicago to recruit him. Meanwhile the Chicago Tribune's editor Harvey(Jack Thompson), has discovered Carter's dark secret, and has decided to send his top reporter, Lexie Littleton(Zellweger) to go wheedle the truth out of him.

So with Lexie in tow, Dodge, Carter and Carter's agent CC Frazier(Jonathan Pryce) head off to save pro football and the world with it. Will Lexie spoil the party? Will she fall in love with one of the two leads? Does the film the least bit funny? The answer to those questions is yes.

The script is extremely wordy, but the actors are more than up to the recitation. The slapstick works too, and all in all, it brings back the feeling of the screwball comedies of the 1930s and '40s. and is well worth a look, even at today's horrific prices.