Review of Gridiron Gang (2006) by Markb. — 30 Nov 2006

Fade this football drama to black and white, substitute Pat O'Brien for Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, omit the street language and drive-by shootings, and include more than just one White guy on the team, and you've got a 1938 "B" movie that would play fairly well as Turner Classic Movies 2 AM fodder.

In short, this shouldn't work nearly as well as it does, so why does it work so well? Unlike its closest current rival, the true-life-with-disclaimers rah-rah saga Invincible, whose pretentiousness only serves to accent how hokey and threadbare it is, Gridiron Gang's utter simplicity, conviction and sincerity really help it to score.

Director Phil Joanou (Three O Clock High, U2 Rattle & Hum) and writer Jeff Maguire (In The Line Of Fire) are seasoned movie pros, but a measure of just how nicely their collaboration works is that one of its Big Moments--in which opposing gang members and other juvenile detention facility inmates in unison refuses a command, which of course tips him off that they're finally working together as a team--is lifted straight from The Dirty Dozen's playbook, but is handled so deftly that it took me days to realize it.

Trevor Rabin's full-bodied musical score is, like the music for Patch Adams and last year's Shopgirl, one of those highly manipulative efforts that tries to tell me how to feel, but I forgave and even enjoyed it because Joanou rather daringly used it in place of the standard gangsta-rap CD jukebox wallpaper that you'd normally expect to hear in a movie dealing with gang warfare; the movie avoids the hypocrisy of speaking out against violence in the dialogue while inadvertently endorsing it on the soundtrack.

Excellent pacing, characters worth rooting for, some wonderfully effective off-the-field sequences (the one where an assistant coach talks the dean of a Christian college into allowing the prison team to play by quoting Bible verses verbatim is a favorite) make this an inspirational movie that really inspires: if it's not quite as effective as recent personal favorites Akeelah and the Bee and The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, that's largely because there are already lots of football movies, very few spelling bee movies and, as far as I know, NO other housewife-who-wins-"complete-this-sentence-in-25-words-or less" movies in existence.

The Rock, who has delivered witty, sly performances in The Scorpion King, The Rundown and Be Cool, is called upon to project total altruism and dedication; he does so with equal charisma and charm. He's apparently the reason why reviewers almost never use the phrase "as an actor, he's a great wrestler" when describing the film work of Hulk Hogan, John Cena or Kane.

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