Leatherheads (Widescreen)

I thought this movie was pretty good. It is old school humor but it has a few yucks in there. Clooney is always good but this movie misses as compared to some of his better comedy roles. I still enjoyed it and think that it will get over with most. It just wasn't great.

This movie had one chance. To take the direction it was going in (cynical reporter sense war story not legit) and turn it around 180 degrees. That is, the "wonder-boy," who everyone expects to be an arrogant liar, is, in actuality, fairly innocent of any of the dirty-dealing that Clooney and Zellwigger seem so upset about. He could have become Zellwigger's love interest and perhaps had a creative twist. No luck. He encouraged a platoon of Germans to surrender by waking up behind them and shouting in German "We surrender" and they all gave up. That got blown up to make him look bigger. Big deal! It was slapstick mixed with narrow-minded mean-spiritted attitude it seems to me on the part of Zellwigger and Clooney. Then Clooney punches the guy out cold in a game witnessed by thousands of people but nobody notices. Thats when i shut it off. Zellwigger, never known as a cheesecake, had better stop taking these roles before she starts embarrassing herself. Her face looked like a puffy 50-year old, and the whole movie left that "left-wing, anti-war hero" stench so popular amongst Hollywood's elite. Trash and burn.

Piece of FACT: Lawrence of Arabia was in actuality,nothing more than a "leader" of a rag-tag bunch of Arabs that cleaned up after the British army had fought, and was content with whatever spoils they could steal. That was his "army."

As a football and history fan, *fortunately* I only rented this. What starts off well as an interesting comedy about the early days of pro football later degenerates into yet another "hero journalist" and "there are no war heroes" styled story. I should've known that something involving Clooney couldn't possibly just be taken at face value with his recent history of pretentious work like Syriana and Good Night and Good Luck.

What transpires is that Clooney's pro team is struggling and folds because pro football is a joke in 1925. The big-nosed guy from the Office is a college star and war hero (from WWI). Clooney meets with him and his agent to get him to play for Duluth and invigorate interest in the pro game of football. Rene Zellweger is a squinty-eyed (but isn't she always?) journalist sent to basically ruin the mythology of the college star's war record for ... basically no reason at all.

I hate to break it Clooney and are film viewers here, but a lot of strange things happen during wartime. Some people get too much credit for events, others get no credit at all. Probably because these stories end up working their way thru several military bureaucracies. So the idea of some major newspaper wanting to ruin one of the war heroes 6 or 7 years after the fact seems to be pretty ludicrous on it's face. Except in the context of "I hate the American war-monger" and "the press is great and always right" George Clooney.

With these offensive elements aside, I'd give the film a "3" but the political content drives it down to a "1" for me.

In the 1920's the best football games were found on college campuses. In this movie, George Clooney's character is an aging football player who is trying to put pro football on the map. He pirates a popular war hero turned Princeton football player and suddenly the crowds begin to follow the pro teams. Renee Zellweger is a sassy, saucy girl reporter who catches Clooney's eye, but seems more interested in the war hero. This is a fun movie which does a great job of depicting the mid-20's while being light and entertaining.

Harken back to the days when professional football was played on muddy fields by players who would rather brawl than run the gridiron with grace and the scoreboard was hard to see under the huge shadow cast by the major college game.

George Clooney - director, producer, "co-writer" - stars in this comedy about the fictional Duluth Bulldogs (in the early NFL years, there was the Duluth Eskimos and Canton Bulldogs) and a league on the verge of financial ruin. The fate of pro football hinges on the signing of a former college superstar who is a combat hero.

With the characters loosely based on iconic figures from the early years of the NFL - George "Papa Bear" Halas, John "Blood" McNally, Red Grange - Clooney, as team captain Dodge Connolly, weaves the pursuit of star Carter "the Bullet" Rutherford (John Krasinski), with the chase for attention from Lexie Littleton, a Chicago news reporter (Renée Zellweger).

The slapstick draws from the 1920s-era films that had football as its backdrop, but the climax is the universal debate by fans of big market versus small market, with "free agency" in the controversy. It is a fun gridiron film that refuses to get too serious.