Part screwball, love-triangle romance, part sports comedy, George Clooney‘s third film behind the camera, the period piece Leatherheads, tells the story of American professional football’s “salad days,” and one man’s very self-interested attempts to push it into the public view. Loose-limbed, loquacious and exceedingly affable, the movie checks off many of the boxes of its genre forebears, but comes totally unglued in the final third, when forced to awkwardly try to pay off its tangled inducements.



When his Duluth Bulldogs finish their latest barnstorming tour broke and out of opponents to play, wily, charming owner-player Dodge Connolly (Clooney) turns his attention toward figuring out a scheme to keep alive his dream of avoiding a real job. A jack-of-all-trades who even dictates grand post-game reports to the local reporter, the rakish Dodge sets his sights on wooing into the fold a wealthy investor, C.C. Frazier (Jonathan Pryce).

Frazier’s latest business client is golden-boy Carter “The Bullet” Rutherford (John Krasinski), a Princeton student, football star and war hero who, legend has it, single-handedly forced an entire German squadron to surrender during service in World War I. What Dodge doesn’t originally know, but quickly finds out, is that hotshot, tart-tongued reporter Lexie Littleton (Renée Zellweger), ostensibly there for a fluff profile piece, has in fact been sent by her editor to craft a take-down article on Carter, whose war story they don’t believe. As Lexie gets close to Carter, so too does Dodge to Lexie. Powered by Carter’s stardom, the team is revitalized, but for how long?

Leatherheads‘ screenplay, an old piece penned in the early 1990s by sports magazine writers Rick Reilly and Duncan Brantley, and presumably tinkered with by Clooney and a number of uncredited script doctors, wallows, to largely winning effect early on, in detail (the team having to forfeit a game because of the lack of a ball, and drying laundry on the outside of a moving train) and dialogue. Great fun is had in mocking Clooney as a “middle-aged boy wonder,” and the actor-director and Zellweger share a number of enjoyable, rapid-fire exchanges, their just-concealed attraction masked by surface irritation.

But Leatherheads‘ third act is about as muddy as the action on the field. A few sequences (an energetic bar-room brawl, for instance) seem thrown in merely for affectation, while most others are rife with wan obligation. There are no sharp angles here, no clear delineation of motives, particularly as it relates to Dodge’s feelings about Carter, whom he knows Lexie is angling to take down and yet whom he needs as a public draw for his own financial survival.

That might be fine if Leatherheads made a few different narrative choices, and just wholeheartedly embraced existence as a ramshackle character piece. The problem is that the film also tries to capture the transitional phase of a sport moving from an independent and inherently irresponsible endeavour to a corporate-backed game with rules and regulations. It does this nicely in a few shorthand visual ways, but awkwardly as applied to its characters. For a movie so invested in whimsy and tone to finally end with a conventional “big game” feels disingenuous at best, and even more tacked on given the lack of concrete stakes tied to the outcome.

If the story winds down in disappointing fashion, the role of Dodge is never less than a perfect fit for Clooney, who pulls out his Cheshire cat grin to twinkly, mischievous effect. Yet Clooney the director also does quite right by his other actors, drastically reducing, if not entirely eliminating, Zellweger’s penchant for squinting, and guiding Krasinski (the small screen American version of The Office) through his best big screen role and performance to date.

Technically, Leatherheads is Clooney’s most ambitious film thus far behind the camera, and he and his collaborators ably deliver on all counts. There’s a warmth to the cinematography of Newton Thomas Sigel (Three Kings, X-Men) and a smart, simple, inviting sense of detail to Jim Bissell’s production design, which ranges in scale from intimate (starch, toothpaste and shaving cream ads featuring Carter’s grinning visage) to the massive scope of an Ennis Field practice and game, abetted by a few nice effects shots. Randy Newman’s horn-waggling, tin-pan alley score, meanwhile, serves as optimistic, ironic counterpoint to the hard-knock economic realities so many of the Duluth footballers face. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here.

For the most part a dispiriting, tedious send-up of superhero origin story clichés, Superhero Movie starts out with a full head of steam but quickly flags, struggling to fill out both its costume and its running time. Like the worst of its downmarket, quick-buck spoof brethren, the film isn’t so much a satire or even clever re-contextualization of well-worn story threads as it is clamorous regurgitation, with just more flatulence jokes.



Despite opening at 300 more theaters than ensemble blackjack picture 21, Superhero Movie, which didn’t screen in advance for critics, placed third for the weekend, ringing up an estimated $9.4 million at just over 2,960 venues. That total was well off the pace of fellow genre spoofs Meet the Spartans and Epic Movie, which each grossed more than double that amount en route to final domestic tallies in the high $30 millions. Seemingly a rare case of a proper snap judgment by the marketplace at large, Superhero Movie will eke out the bulk of the rest of its modest earnings via pay-cable and ancillary outlets.

Modeled around Spider-Man, with a pinch of Batman’s parents’ deaths as an extra source of “motivation,” the film’s story centers around Rick Riker (Drake Bell, of TV’s Drake & Josh), a gangly high school student who lives with his aunt and uncle and nurses a crush on his knockout next-door neighbor, Jill Johnson (Sara Paxton). After being bitten by a genetically altered bug on a school field trip, Rick finds himself blessed with superpowers, and caught up in a life of crime-fighting as Dragonfly. Naturally, his path crosses with Lou Landers (Christopher McDonald), the uncle of a classmate and the terminally ill CEO of a pharmaceuticals company who tests out a new drug invention and develops a maniacal, bloodthirsty alter ego.

One doesn’t head to a spoof like Superhero Movie for artful interplay or newly tilled narrative terrain, but the laugh quotient here feels especially padded, and the film needs an extended, very slow crawl of closing credit outtakes to even crack the 80-minute mark. Some of the bigger names in the movie, featured prominently on the poster (Pamela Anderson, Craig Bierko, Simon Rex) are reduced to single-scene appearances of far less than a minute, while others (Tracy Morgan) seem to play characters whose comic potential is not fully tapped.

Writer-director Craig Mazin did script duty on the last two Scary Movie flicks (in addition to Senseless and RocketMan), so he in theory knows about both stitching referential jokes together and tailoring material for specific stars. His script here, though, seems designed to have garnered an initial production green light, and little more. After the first 20 to 25 minutes (i.e., roughly all that would have been scrutinized by some studio executives), funny scene ideas (like Dragonfly bumping into another superhero at his new rooftop brooding spot) are either dashed through in unfulfilled fashion or discarded altogether, in favor of goosing, arguably topical spoofs of public figures, like Stephen Hawking, Barry Bonds and Nelson Mandela.

Back in the director’s chair for the first time since 2000’s independently produced superhero spoof The Specials, Mazin evidences no great skill one way or another. To his nominal credit, he doesn’t solely reference other movies, and he does endeavor to work in a number of visual gags to supplement the writing. The mad-dash pace, though, wrecks Superhero Movie, along with slapstick sequences with no lasting (or even immediate) consequences.

As for performances, Bell is passable but somewhat unmemorable as the lead, unlike the great find of the Scary Movie series, Anna Faris, whose wide-eyed blitheness radiated a charm that announced a bubbly new comedic presence — something her subsequent turns in Lost in Translation, Just Friends and Smiley Face would confirm. Seeing Nielsen here, though, only whets one appetite for a rental of Naked Gun or Police Squad! Special note, meanwhile, goes out to Miles Fisher, who nails the vocal intonations of Tom Cruise in his parody of a sit-down interview with the star.

Technical credits are for the most part adequate, with James L. Venable’s opening score providing a credible appropriation of manufactured comic book-style emotional uplift. Likewise, Bob Ziembicki’s budget production design does a capable job of subtly, smartly recreating spaces from the Spider-Man, X-Men and Batman franchises. On the downside, a cash infusion for some more effects work would have given the movie a slickness that it’s missing, and one that any real spoof of the superhero genre seemingly demands. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (MGM/Weinstein Company, PG-13, 85 minutes)

International Film Circuit, the independent distributor of Adam Carolla’s new and loosely autobiographical movie The Hammer, must be breathing a big sigh of relief in the wake of the acid-tongued radioman’s continued presence on ABC’s Dancing with the Stars. Carolla’s survival of the first round, two-week vote-off, after all, seems integral to any modestly-scaled success The Hammer
might experience, given that it means millions of viewers will still
have a chance to see and enjoy him during the very weeks that his film
expands nationally.

Taking a story credit but ceding the screenplay work to The Man Show
writer Kevin Hench, Carolla stars as Jerry Ferro, a 40-year-old, once-promising
amateur boxer who’s been knocking around from one construction job to
another, his last connection to the fight game being the evening boxing class he teaches at a Pasadena Bodies in
Motion. Impressed with his sparring and take-down of his client, a
legendary coach floats the notion of Jerry training for a shot at the
Olympic trials, thinking that way he’ll save on having to actually pay
him. With his friend Ozzie (Oswaldo Castillo), Jerry begins an unlikely
quest, and also strikes up a burgeoning relationship with one of his
workout clients, public defender Lindsay Pratt (Heather Juergensen,
above right, also Hench’s husband), along the way.

Shot two summers ago in Sherman Oaks,
Burbank and Van Nuys, and featuring many of the old haunts that Carolla
toiled in and around, The Hammer tries to milk its threadbare production value for all it’s worth. The movie is rather poorly directed by Charles Herman-Wurmfeld (Kissing Jessica Stein), and the romantic stuff plays awkwardly. In some ways, it’s fair to say the movie succeeds in spite of itself.
But its affection for the blue-collar working class is so deeply and honestly felt, and Carolla, while not a natural actor in any sense of the word, is a pleasantly tart screen companion. He’s a
guy for whom you root, because while he takes it on the chin and tries
to change things, he’s also a hardcore realist aware of his own
strengths and limitations.

“Success isn’t a big part of my DNA,” says
Jerry, who at one point takes a fellow boxer’s salty put-down of him
being middle-class and deftly twists it into a sarcastic comeback. “I’m
having trouble focusing on what else you said, because that may be the
biggest compliment anyone has ever paid me.” Now a millionaire several
times over in real life, Carolla has the means to distance himself from the
socioeconomic traumas of his roots — to buy his way up, in essence.
Instead, he surrounds himself with folks like Castillo, a Nicaraguan
immigrant he met on a construction gig in 1989. That sincerity and
loyalty makes Carolla real, and very relatable. The quick-jab wit,
meanwhile, has made him wealthy. For more on Carolla, and the full review of the movie, from FilmStew, click here.

The remake of a same-named 2004 Thai film, enervated horror flick Shutter, which opened last week without benefit of advance screening for critics, tells the story of a young American couple vacationing in Japan who cope with a vengeful ghost and try to unravel the mystery of a woman they may or may not have hit with their car. Listless performances, overly familiar visual iconography and unimaginative set-ups render the movie worthy of nothing more than a shrug — even from the less demanding under-15 set for which it was chiefly designed.

Among wide new releases, Shutter placed third for the weekend, pulling
in $10.4 million at just over 2,750 theatres. That total fell well
short of fellow freshman entry Meet the Browns, but somewhat
surprisingly edged out the more aggressively marketed Drillbit Taylor,
starring Owen Wilson. Steep fall-off and a lack of positive
word-of-mouth will hardly matter with this modestly budgeted picture,
designed from the get-go to earn a quick, quiet buck. Two or three more
overshadowed weekends in theaters will eventually yield to modest, par
pay-cable and DVD earnings, placing Shutter even or slightly ahead of
2006’s Pulse ($20.2 million domestically, $9.5 million
internationally), another PG-13 horror film remade from an Eastern
property.

Following their wedding, Jane (Rachael Taylor) and Ben Shaw (Joshua Jackson) head straight to Japan, their honeymoon doubling as a work
assignment for Ben, a fashion photographer. En route to Tokyo by car at
night, the pair suffer an accident on a snowy back road; Jane insists
they struck a woman. Plagued by both unnerving visions and spectral
distortions in photographs they’ve taken, Jane and Ben deduce the woman
to be Megumi (Megumi Okina, above right), a translator and former needy girlfriend
of Ben’s from a previous work stint in the country. More havoc ensues,
and Jane, already a bit grabby and needy, begins to wonder if Ben is
telling the full truth about the extent of his relationship with Megumi.

For a fleeting moment or two early on, Japanese director Masayuki
Ochiai (Infection) seems committed to at least crafting a movie with a
definitive sense of style, but a small handful of in-frame effects and
interesting compositions quickly give way to pedestrian framing and
desultory jump-scares.

That the film’s signature moments of dread and shock come via another
pale-faced, wet, dark-haired girl — a figure of menace already roundly
skewered by the Scary Movie series, among others — is perhaps
unfortunate, but not an insurmountable impediment to tension. The
sociocultural isolation of the setting could be used to the story’s
advantage, to feed especially Jane’s sense of unease and
discombobulation. Instead, though, Luke Dawson’s script offers up lame set-ups (visits to
a psychic investigator and Megumi’s house) and perfunctory dialogue
that requires Jackson’s character shift back and forth in sympathy to
his new wife. As such, even the nominal twist in the film’s final third
feels tacked on, and silly.

As in last summer’s Transformers, which at least had the excuse of
giant, clamorous robots distracting one’s attention, Taylor utterly fails to make an impression one
way or another. Former Dawson’s Creek star Jackson, meanwhile, invests wholeheartedly in exactly
one emotion for each scene, and otherwise just lets his stubble shade
the characterization. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here.