BEFORE: This will bring the Robin Williams chain to an end after 9 days, and I'm hoping to end on a high note. Some of these films have been quite dark and depressing, and that's even before taking Robin's suicide into account. I guess you can debate whether comic figures lead tragic lives, or whether perhaps his history of playing loners and losers in movies had anything to do with it.
There are still Robin Williams films left unwatched - like the Robert Redford chain, it's impossible for me to get to every single film in an actor's filmography. In this case, I haven't seen "RV", "Man of the Year", the third "Night at the Museum" film, "Old Dogs", "Father's Day", "Boulevard", "The Big White", "Seize the Day", "Nine Months", "The Survivors", "Moscow on the Hudson" and "Flubber". But I don't have interest in most of those films, I'll probably watch the latest "Night at the Museum", but otherwise, I think I'm good.
THE PLOT: A small-town loser determines to have one more shot at the big time by winning a football game.
AFTER: For the purposes of this film, we're meant to believe in a football rivalry between two California towns, Taft (formerly named Moron) and Bakersfield. Bakersfield ALWAYS wins, except for that time back in 1972 when the game ended in a tie. (Right off the bat, we've got our first NITPICK POINT: Do high school football games end in ties? What happened to overtime?) The man who failed to catch the ball on a long, desperate last-second pass is unable to move forward with his life, unable to come out from the shadow of the game, and is constantly called "Butterfingers" by the townspeople.
NITPICK POINT #2: If Taft usually wins the game by a wide margin, why is the tie score something to be embarrassed about? Isn't a tie better than a loss? Instead of being taunted, shouldn't the members of the 1972 team be seen as champions, relatively speaking? They did the near impossible, they matched the score of a tougher, better-funded rival team. In my opinion, they should have the run of that town and be seen as winners, not as losers.
But once the receiver gets it in his head that the game can be replayed, that's all he can focus on, and he'll go to whatever lengths are necessary, including deception, to convince people to replay the game. Unfortunately, it's quite coincidental that our hero's chief antagonist is also his boss and his father-in-law, and also just happens to be a big supporter of the opposing team. Very convenient that one character serves four different purposes...
NITPICK POINT #3: It's a cute idea, but once people get past the idea of "Why NOT replay the game?" I guess things have gone too far, and no one regresses back to "Why replay the game?" Because you can't actually replay a game - you can have the same match-up, with the same athletes, but that game is always on the books forever, and no school or athletic association would be willing to replay a game unless there was some giant technical foul-up during the original game, which there wasn't.
However, we do live in a strange age now regarding sports - given the penalties levied against Penn State and Lance Armstrong due to scandals, there are now sports victories which have been "voided" or "vacated" - meaning that those wins no longer count. You might think that in the case of the Tour de France or some Olympic scandal that the 2nd place finisher would become the 1st place winner, but apparently that's not how these things work. A silver medal remains a silver medal, it's just that now NO ONE was awarded the gold medal or the yellow jersey for that race. In the wake of the Penn State sex scandal, all victories were vacated between 1998-2011. The wins were eventually reinstated, I think mainly for the sake of clarity, just because, well, who won those games then?
And let's not get started on Tom Brady again - I can't tell you how many times I've seen reactions to "Deflategate" (or is it "Ballghazi"?) where people have wondered, "Well, what are they going to do, replay the Super Bowl?" Well, no, largely because you can't do that, and the game that was affected by the football deflation scandal was NOT the Super Bowl, it was the AFC Championship Game. And if you entertain the possibility of that game being replayed, then it could have a different victor, and you'd then have a different team going to the Super Bowl, so, yeah, we're not doing that.
Also starring Kurt Russell (last seen in "Tequila Sunrise"), Pamela Reed (also carrying over from "Cadillac Man"), Holly Palance (last seen in "Under Fire"), Donald Moffat, Margaret Whitton, M. Emmet Walsh (last seen in "Random Hearts"), Kirk Cameron, Robin Lively, Eloy Casados, with cameos from Carl Ballantine, Kathleen Freeman (last seen in "Kiss Them For Me")
RATING: 4 out of 10 portraits of the Colonel
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