Leatherheads

Not to further my great big pile-on of George Clooney any further but what the fuckery was this?

I think by now my opinion of George Clooney is clear. He’s one of the most criminally over-rated actors of his generation, incredibly smug, and not all that good-looking. But I’ve never had a problem with him as a director. “Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind” was very good indeed, and whilst Good Night And Good Luck was an awful film (yes it was, you know it was) the direction was pretty impeccable in terms of creating a sense of time and place, as well as being pretty fucking arty by Hollywood standards

But now we get Leatherheads. A story about wise-cracking professional American Footballers in the 1930s and not only the next gallumphing step in Clooney’s clumsy elephant-walk to be this century’s Cary Grant (not happening) but also pretty outstandingly poor and clod-hopping in every possible direction.

First the script, which aspires to the screwball wit and repartee of the 1940s but which instead produces rapidfire dialogue so hackneyed it had me biting my cushion. At no point in this Millennium should a script be using the exchange of “I didn’t come here to be insulted?” ; “Where do you normally go?” which didn’t even make sense in the FIRST PLACE. The acting’s not much better either. Clooney mugs fit to beat the band, Renee Zellweger is there with her little hamster face veering off through “snappy, streetwise wisecracking female reporter” in 5 seconds, winding up in “obnoxious, shrewish bitch”, and John Krasinski (as a sometimes-dopey, sometimes-not (depending on the script’s whims at any given moment) college football star with a mysterious record as a war-hero) ends up making his character so likeable that the whole timbre of the film tilts off-kilter, because instead of a caharcter with shades of grey, he comes across as a poor beknighted woobie who should just be LEFT ALONE.

And I do think this is a failing on his part – his character is slightly arrogant and jocky for all of the first 15 minutes of the film, then dissolves into a mess of doe eyes and sad but noble faces that I can’t imagine were in the script.

The plotting is abysmal as well. Strong character actors are given background characters to play with precisely no purpose whatsoever (heck knows why Stephen Root is even there), the “heroes” and the “villain” have exactly the same purpose, opinions and moral scruples, but because the former is played by George Clooney and the latter by Jonathan Pryce we know one is GOOD and one is EVIL. And the whole dramatic resolution is trumped by some cack-handed commentary about how boring American Football is, which I doubt even Americans care about.

Oh and the directing is woeful as well. Neither pastiche enough to be funny, or straight enough to be taken seriously, the whole film just meanders along from aborted set-piece to aborted set-piece (The very fact of a bar-fight is not funny! Neither is the fact of Renee Zellweger in a cop’s uniform! Or two men just punching each other!) Honestly the whole sorry shambles is ass-backwards, utterly charmless and totally full of itself.

A waste quite frankly.