Apr 07, 2008,
C. Robert Cargill
In light of the bad buzz coming off of this week’s Clooney vehicle, Leatherheads, the question comes to mind: what could possibly be worse than this looks? While I still hold out hope for Clooney's film it conjures thoughts of the very worst sports movies I’ve ever seen. And here they are:
Crossover
Reviled, despised and thoroughly loathed for all the right reasons, this movie is just plain bad. I mean when Wayne Brady fans walk out shaking their heads, wondering why he decided to play his Chappelle's Show character IN ALL SERIOUSNESS, you know something has gone terribly wrong. Rated the 14th worst film of all time on IMDb.com, this movie hits all the lows you’d expect, and then some.
The real kicker, of course, is that this barely qualifies as a sports film. Despite being a basketball movie, there’s nary any basketball in it. That didn’t stop them from advertising it or portraying it in every way as a basketball movie. So it makes the list. What’s worse than a bad basketball movie with hardly any basketball? Apparently only 13 other things.
Aspen Extreme
My own personal hell as few have ever seen it. This festering turd stands as the very first press screening I ever attended, having won the tickets off the radio when I was a teenager. What I was treated to was seemingly a scene-by-scene remake of Top Gun, but with skiers instead of fighter pilots. Most notable in the film is a young Peter Berg (the actor-turned-director of such great films as The Rundown and The Kingdom) who plays the Anthony Edwards “Goose” role of the best friend who dies at a pivotal moment, forcing our hero to try to get revenge by winning the much hyped final skiing event. Oh wait, did I spoil the big emotional twist? Really? Good luck finding this ANYWHERE to be sure.
The Comebacks
Representing the recent trend in Hollywood of releasing super lame, lowest-common-denominator parodies, The Comebacks dares to take scenes from almost every sports film released in the past decade and simply … references them. It never says anything clever or shows any understanding of how the movies or scenes they’re parodying actually work. It merely acts upon the principle that if you show something familiar, people will laugh. Guess what? We’ve seen it all before. And nobody laughed.
Kicking and Screaming
Nothing could more aptly describe my reaction to sitting in a theater and actually watching this rubbish than the title before you. As bad as many Will Ferrell sports comedies are, this is the one so bad that everyone actually forgets about it. Ferrell stars as a soccer dad who takes over coaching the local loser team when his kids are cut by their own grandfather (and his father). The result is one of the most mind-numbingly awful attempts to remake The Bad News Bears I’ve ever seen, and the movie that took Ferrell’s man-child routine a step too far. There was a time that I though his shtick was funny. This movie made me feel otherwise. For good.
Ed
In what can only be described as one of the greatest acting one-upmanships of all time, the screen was set positively ablaze by pitting the tremendous talent of Matt LeBlanc against the acting chops of a trained monkey. In a baseball movie. Guess who won? Here’s a hint: the winner never appeared on Friends. Somewhere out there, Tony Danza is laughing his ass off.
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