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DVD Kicking & Screaming
Will Ferrell is at his full, frenzied power as Phil Weston, a married, uncoordinated would-be sportsman with an uncoordinated would-be sportsman son--and an unresolved relationship with his coach father, Buck (Robert Duvall), who has very little tolerance for the uncoordinated. When Buck trades his own grandson to a real loser of a little league soccer team, Phil naturally takes over underdog coaching duties and the two men butt heads. You could easily, and perhaps rightfully, dismiss all of this as a dumb, demented Meatballs or Bad News Bears rip-off, but it's pleasantly dumb and sometimes hysterically demented: Encouraged by his neighbor, ex-Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka (yes, playing himself), Phil stops his vitamin regimen and becomes wildly addicted to regular doses of caffeine, which turns him into a monster of a team leader. In addition to Ferrell, Duvall does a doozy of a comic riff on his Great Santini role, and even Ditka is unexpectedly funny. It's a formula film with just enough far-out notions to keep you chuckling. --Steve Wiecking
Batman and Robin's opinion on kicking and screaming.
Hi! Yup, it;s Robin again. Kicking and Screaming? Impossible to descride in one word, funny? Is that not enough, hilarious? Unusual? Hint to the movie, Juiceboxxish? If you like soccer,coffee, or underdog stories you'll love this one. Even if you don't like any of those you'll like it anyway. By the way, for this movie, gotta love the opening line. See ya, here's Batman.
Hello I'm Batman,the pink knight. This movie wuz awsome. It wuz also funny. If you are looking for a movie to watch, get this one. It wuz the best sports movie I have ever seen,and remember,MEAT COMES FIRST.
SOCCER TO ME
Will Ferrell can be fitfully funny at times; and at other times, he can be fitfully annoying. He has moments of both in this entertaining if derivative kiddie flick. Ferrell plays the not so jockish son of jock Robert Duvall, who finds himself drafted to coach his son's really bad soccer team. Ferrell finds himself getting addicted to caffeine and lucks into two good players in Italian children who help their uncle in his butcher shop. Former Chicago Bear Mike Ditka generates a few laughs playing himself, and the kids are appropriately cute. It's all predictable and harmless fun the family can watch together.
Remember when Will Ferrell used to make funny movies?
Let me say up front that I think Will Farrell is one of the five funniest humans currently walking the the face of the earth. That said, based on his involvement with "Kicking and Screaming", he is also one of the five worst judges of movie scripts!
All right, maybe that's a little unfair to say, since he was in "Old School" and "Anchorman", which were both very funny movies. And I guess it's possible that at some point -- very, very early in its development period -- "Kicking & Screaming" might have shown enough promise to make him think it'd be a worthy successor to those bombastic comedies.
So what happened? I suspect that, at a key juncture, the filmmakers decided to approach it as BOTH a G-rated kids' sports movie and an adult comedy. As has happened with most such films before it (many helmed my directors more adept than Jesse Dylan), the result is an empty movie orphan which satisfies neither audience.
And it doesn't help that the film looks like it was directed by a 12-year-old -- with spare change, on a saturday afternoon -- who has never even WATCHED soccer before.
It's tough to call this a truly awful movie, because there are a few laughs scattered here and there, mostly because Ferrell is able to mine one or two golden nuggets from the mostly barren script. But they are few and far between. He has little help from the rest of the cast (aside from Mike Ditka), and the kids especially are a disappointment. I expect more from executive producer Judd Apatow, who scored a slam dunk with his cast for the TV show "Freaks and Geeks." I guess he used up all of his casting inspiration on that show, because this is perhaps the least memorable kid cast ever.
As you probably know by now, Ferrell plays Phil Weston, an over-his-head youth soccer coach saddled with a sad-sack team who feels inadequacy towards his father (Robert Duvall), also a coach, but more successful. Hilarity is supposed to ensue from this premise, but doesn't. Despite the use of every single tired sports-movie cliche in the book.
The main problem is that we never care about any of characters. We never get any feel for the relationship between Ferrell and his kid, which should be pivotal because that's what gets him into coaching. The kids are broad stroked and typecast (the short shy kid, the big slow kid, the jokester, etc.) and never really figure into the story in any meaningful way. And Mike Ditka is supposed to be Duvall's nemesis...but why? Motivations are never explained. The result is a very empty movie.
Director Jesse Dylan (son of Bob Dylan) brings nothing to the party and ineptly stages a series of pratfall-ridden music videos featuring the most used-to-death sports anthems -- Vangelis' theme from "Chariots of Fire," Queen's "We Are the Champions" and Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger."
And I'm no soccer expert per se, but I played for 13 years and can tell good-movie soccer from bad-movie soccer...and this is as bad as it gets! I was shocked to learn that they had "soccer advisors" on-set. I hope that's not your day job, guys, because this is some very shoddy stuff!
If you're looking for a good family sports movie, check out Dennis Quaid's "The Rookie" which came out a few years ago. And that advice goes double for anybody associated with "Kicking and Screaming" who might be reading this!
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