BEFORE: Wrapping up football as a topic tonight, hopefully this is the last word on the subject. I've been waiting for some channel to air this one, with no luck. I then tried downloading it from a file-sharing site, but the download didn't work - someone must be cracking down. Finally I broke down and rented it from iTunes, something I haven't done before - but I may need to do this more often if there is a film crucial to my chain that I can't get cheaply some other way. If I don't watch this film tonight, my chain might fall apart - as Burt Reynolds from "Semi-Tough" links through "Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" to Charles Durning (last seen in "The Last Supper").
THE PLOT: A semi-fictional account of life as a professional football player. Loosely based on the Dallas Cowboys team of the early 1970s.
AFTER: This is right in line with "Semi-Tough", another film that show the hard living that went on in the personal lives of NFL players in the swinging 70's. Parties, beer, pot, anonymous sex - it's strange to feel nostalgic for sex and drugs, which never really went away, but somehow it seems like both things were more free-wheeling and innocent back then. Maybe "innocent" isn't the right word - care-free? This was before AIDS and the "Just Say No" anti-drug campaigns.
Nick Nolte (last seen in "Jefferson in Paris"), though playing an aging football player here, was not a bad-looking guy when he was younger (he was 37 or 38 at the time) - he resembles Ethan Hawke, but with a cheezy moustache. I'm surprised no casting director has taken advantage of their similar look and put them in a movie as father and son. The age of 38 would be considered old for a football player, though, so Nolte does fit right in here - and he's great at playing injured or drunk or doped up (or all three at once).
The mechanics of football are here, at least to a greater extent than "Semi-Tough", but it's not always flattering. The use of painkillers, vitamin B-12, and (I assume) steroids - since no one's ever really known for having "Vitamin B-12 rage" - is rampant, and that's just on the playing field. Then you've got the leisure-time drugs like beer, grass, and all those wacky sex drugs people took in the 70's, like amyl nitrate. It makes me think that Kurt Vonnegut was right, we're all just walking bags of chemicals.
No matter what Nolte's character and his teammates accomplish, it's never enough for the head coach. In a manner similar to "Moneyball", the coach has calculated what the team's stats and percentages should be, according to his computer - too bad he's stuck using an old TRS-80.
The movie is low-rent in a number of other ways, too - the "championship game" (clearly not the Super Bowl, even though the team's charts clearly state that's their goal) looks like it was played on a high-school field, with no crowd of cheering fans in sight. And they could only afford one facial expression for the lead actress who plays Nolte's girlfriend - so she responds to every development in their relationship with the same combination of fear and concern that she uses while watching the big game.
I won't spoil the ending, but I will say that it's ballsy for a sports film. And after seeing similar endings in sports film after sports film, a change is oddly welcome.
Also starring Mac Davis (last seen in "The Sting II"), Dayle Haddon, Bo Svenson (last seen in "Speed 2: Cruise Control"), John Matuszak, G.D. Spradlin (last seen in "The War of the Roses"), Dabney Coleman (last seen in "The Towering Inferno").
RATING: 5 out of 10 jumping jacks
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