"The Replacements"

Watching Keanu Reeves play a scab QB makes four quarters in hell look inviting.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Aug 11, 2000 | I want the world to know that I saw "The Replacements." All of it, beginning to end. Every pop-song montage, every outlandishly exaggerated football action sequence, every close-up of a fat guy's naked stomach and a cheerleader's tightly packaged tits, every lovingly rendered vomit take. I even laughed out loud during the jailhouse dance number set to "I Will Survive," which hit the level of a moderately funny TV commercial. I won't apologize; I was a broken man.

What choice did I have? Yes, it's true that I get paid to write these reviews (to the endless amazement of some of you), but by the one-hour mark I would gladly have paid as much as I'll earn for this review, if not more, just to get out of there. I tried a catatonic stupor for a while, but the egregious score -- in an MOR rock style I didn't think existed anymore -- snapped me out of it. (Actually, I kind of liked one song on the soundtrack. It turned out to be by the 88-year-old Rolling Stones, which will tell you what this movie did to my powers of discernment.)

Failing to find any cockroaches to train or squashed Jujubes to play with under my seat, I began to pose myself conundrums to pass the time. What in the name of all that's holy is Keanu Reeves -- fresh from "The Matrix," the biggest commercial success of his career -- doing in this humiliating sports comedy, which is sort of but not really based on the National Football League players strike of 1987? Has he been brainwashed or replaced by a replicant? (In the latter case, the movie's title assumes a sinister Philip K. Dick significance.) Do the producers of "The Replacements" have photos featuring Reeves, Madeleine Albright and a frisky fox terrier named Archibald? Were no better parts available? In the category of better parts, by the way, I would include the heartthrob title role in "Slobodan Milosevic in Love" and the villainous dance-hall mastermind in the long-awaited sequel to "Lambada: The Forbidden Dance."

There are only two kinds of sports movies: One is "The Bad News Bears" and the other is, well, something else, generally full of autumnal masculine sadness, like "Pride of the Yankees" or last year's execrable "For Love of the Game." "The Replacements" is the first kind, a smugly heartwarming little fable about a bunch of sad sacks molded by adversity into winners. By turns crudely offensive and cloyingly sentimental, "The Replacements" is also reactionary and hypocritical, playing shamelessly to public resentment of both star athletes and organized labor.

I believe this represents a new low in the career of director Howard Deutch, a one-time John Hughes protigi who peaked with "Pretty in Pink," his very first film, and more recently found his tepid level with "Grumpier Old Men" and "The Odd Couple II." Even by the sloppy standards of the sports-farce genre, "The Replacements" sucks igneous rock. It has the labored, clueless feeling of a film directed by a small child, or perhaps an intelligent but mean-spirited parakeet. By comparison, Adam Sandler's "The Waterboy" is erudite wit worthy of Oscar Wilde; I think we're somewhere down around the level of "Ladybugs," in which Rodney Dangerfield coaches a girls' soccer team.

Sports fans will remember the real NFL strike and the league's use of semipro or washed-out replacement players as perhaps the most bizarre event in pro football's checkered history. Dealt with honestly, it could have made a fascinating movie. For some of the substitutes, the chance to play in the NFL was indeed the storybook fulfillment of a dream, even in such dubious circumstances. But for the league as a whole, along with the media and the vast majority of fans, the replacement games were gruesome and amateurish spectacles that were best avoided and rapidly forgotten. (Eventually the real players broke down and began crossing picket lines; it remains the only time in modern sports history when league owners have conclusively defeated a players union.)

Vince McKewin's screenplay for "The Replacements" deals with none of these complexities. Instead we get a study in stock villainy and heroism: The striking players are depicted as sneering, arrogant assholes consumed by unreasoning greed, while the replacements are lovable Everymen who play with fire and heart and soul and every other sports clichi you can imagine. Needless to say, the cruel brevity of a football player's career is never mentioned, nor is the fact that these players make significantly less than their peers in baseball or basketball and rarely receive guaranteed contracts. It's not my job to defend the inflated salaries of contemporary sports, but why don't right-wing creeps on talk radio bitch about, say, Keanu Reeves, who will earn more from this movie alone than any NFL player makes in a year? It strikes me that athletes and movie actors are in the same business, and the money they make, for better or worse, reflects the governing values of our society.

Somehow I'm not horrified by the way Gene Hackman sails through his role here as Jimmy McGinty, "that old coach from the '80s," as Reeves' character, quarterback Shane Falco, puts it. (McGinty's Bear Bryant wardrobe is more like the '50s, but never mind.) Hackman long ago became the American answer to Michael Caine, a fine actor who can survive the crappiest movies imaginable with his professionalism more or less unscathed.

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