| Buy the DVD |   |
| Buy the VHS | |
| Genre: | Comedy |
| Year: | 2000 |
| Rating: | PG13 |
| Length: | 1 Hour 58 Minutes |
| Cast: | Howard Deutch, Keanu Reeves, Gene Hackman, Orlando Jones |
Armchair quarterbacks across the land often hearken back to the glory days of 1987, when the NFL Players Association strike ignited fans' passions for twice-released, balding nose tackles and punters with Buddha-like bellies. Okay, maybe not. Actually, few memories seem less likely to provoke smiles than those of the NFL's '87 labor pains, but The Replacements somehow manages to complete this filmic Hail Mary pass. Going beyond the pale of standard sports farce with a streak of genuine emotion, The Replacements (which updates the strike to the late '90s) scores far more than it fumbles. Scab coach Gene Hackman spells out the film's mantra early on: "Gentlemen, you're paid to play. The men whose places you're taking forgot that." The men whose places they're taking, as you might expect, get quite a drubbing in this film: The road to hell is obviously paved with their egos and driven over by their Ferraris. But the film avoids bogging itself down with anti-unionism and stays afloat thanks to the expectedly snappy rapport among the unlikely misfits haphazardly teamed as the fictional Washington Sentinels. Keanu Reeves is former all-American quarterback Shane Falco -- with a legacy of a disastrous Sugar Bowl blowout four years earlier -- who gets the opportunity to lead the Sentinels and rewrite his own history. Reeves's presence gives The Replacements a unisex attraction -- men get to see a pretty boy get his butt whipped, while women get to see him emerge wondrously from the scrums, his sculpted coif perfectly intact. And Hackman, ever reliable and stodgy, retools his Hoosiers persona to stand as mentor and straight man for these goofy yet admirably resilient heroes. Adam Coppelman
|
|
|
|
