BEFORE: Another comedy, this one hearkening back to the early days of pro football in the 1920's, starring (and directed by) George Clooney, and my birthday-twin John Krasinski.
THE PLOT: The captain of a professional football team drafts a strait-laced college sensation, only to watch his new star fall for his fiancée.
AFTER: The contest on the field is no match for the battle of the sexes, as Dodge Connelly (Clooney) matches wits with reporter Lexie Littleton (Renee Zellweger) with Carter Rutherford (Krasinski) as the third leg of the love triangle. There's a lot of snappy banter and sharp dialogue - the movie's set in the 1920's, when some women were becoming more assertive in the job market.
Littleton is offered an assistant editor position at the Tribune if she can get the real story about Rutherford, who's an alleged war hero, then a football star. But Dodge needs his war hero's status intact, in order to put fans into the stadium to watch games in the ailing pro football league. At the same time, the game of football gets its first commissioner, so Dodge's tricky brand of no-rules football is coming to an end.
I liked how this movie illustrated a fundamental truth about men - if they're fighting over a woman (or anything, really), two guys just need to drink some beers together, or punch each other in the face - or both - and they're friends again. Or at least friendly rivals. How women settle their differences, I have no idea...
I have to take a point off for a number of anachronistic errors - Krasinski's character gives his age as 24, and the movie is set in 1925. Yet he's supposedly a war hero - even if he had entered World War I in 1917, he would have been 16 at the time. Not impossible, but the movie points out that he "took time off from Princeton" to fight, and then came back to school. If he came back to college in 1918, would he still be in college 7 years later? There are a number of other errors (like no elevator operators, songs played that weren't written until 1927) but that one is the worst of them.
RATING: 7 out of 10 train tickets
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