Playing for Keeps

 

Gabriele Muccino's Playing for Keeps is pleasant enough and inoffensive, and that's about it.  It doesn't have any ambition to be anything more than that.  It doesn't want to be smart, or funny, or give us characters we can care about.  It lacks the drive that a lot of basic movies have.  Despite this, it was somehow able to attract some big talent like Gerard Butler, Jennifer Biel, Catherine Zeta Jones, Dennis Quaid, and Uma Thurman.  This movie won't make a big dent in their careers.  It also probably won't make much of a dent in the box office.

The central plot focuses on George (Gerard Butler), a former pro soccer player who had his career sidelined by an injury.  He's been trying to reinvent himself for the past few years, with various failed ventures like real estate and a sports bar.  For now, he's mainly concentrating on fixing his personal life, and building a relationship with his 9-year-old son from a previous marriage.  The son is Lewis (Noah Lomax).  As a movie kid, he's pleasant enough, and never cloying.  But the movie never really bothers to create much of a relationship between the two.  Sadly, this is not the last time you'll hear me say this about the screenplay by Robbie Fox.  The movie wants to be a touching and heartwarming film about a guy who was never much of a father to his son learning to bond with the boy.  We're supposed to sense some kind of connection between them, especially when George takes over as the coach of the kid's soccer team.  But we never do, because the script doesn't really look into the relationship that these two have with each other.

It doesn't help that this plot is routinely sidetracked by a pointless and not very funny subplot concerning all the local soccer moms suddenly becoming attracted to George once he becomes the coach, and they immediately start throwing themselves at him.  Outside of one of these moms, none of them play any part in the story, nor do their individual plots or moments with George go anywhere.  The soccer moms are played by talented actresses like Catherine Zeta Jones, Judy Greer, and Uma Thurman.  But, all but one of them are given absolutely nothing to do.  The one who actually is given a part to play is Jones.  She's plays a woman with connections to the sportscasting world, and she might be able to give George a shot as an ESPN commentator.  This brings about the minor crisis as to whether or not George wants to leave his son, and his ex-wife, Stacie (Jessica Biel), whom he still has feelings for.  Yes, I said "minor crisis".  In most movies, this would probably be a pretty big plot point.  But Playing for Keeps treats it so haphazardly and resolves it so awkwardly, it doesn't get to make much of an impression.

Another equally pointless subplot concerns the Dennis Quaid character, Carl.  He's a wealthy playboy jerk who constantly cheats on his wife (played by Thurman), and throws money around like it's water.  Early on, the movie seems to be building Carl up to be a major character.  He tries to strike up a friendship with George, invites him to a lavish party, and even lets him borrow one of his luxury cars.  But the character, and the plot concerning him, never grows or builds to anything.  The fact that he pretty much disappears from the entire second act of the film, only to make an embarrassingly shoehorned in return in the third, lets us know that the character could have been rewritten or removed with little consequence.  There is a scene where he ends up in prison, and George has to bail him out, forcing him to miss one of his kid's big games.  Outside of this, the scene has absolutely no consequence or purpose.  The movie doesn't even make a big deal as to why he was arrested in the first place. (He was in a bar fight, but that's all we really learn.)

I blame all of this movie's problems on the screenplay.  It's unfocused, and constantly jumping around to various characters and plots that don't have anything to do with the story it's trying to tell.  Either that, or the plots are so underwritten, they come across as being pointless.  With another rewrite or two, this could have been quite the charming little film.  The cast is certainly up to the challenge.  They're likable, and never offend.  It's just that the screenplay gives them so little to do, or doesn't bother to develop their characters beyond the surface.  We don't get any genuine emotion.  How does George feel about all these soccer moms hitting on him?  He never really gets to express himself.  Why did Stacie and him break up in the first place?  Aside from some cursory dialogue ("You refused to grow up", Stacie tells George), we have no idea.  The script is constantly content to just skim the surface with its characters, never digging deep enough to make them honest to the audience.

 

Playing for Keeps just doesn't try hard enough, and because of that, it's likely to be gone and forgotten by the time the big holiday movies hit in a couple weeks.  It has a couple nice moments, and I smiled a few times, but outside of that, it made absolutely no impression.  It doesn't want to be memorable or worthwhile.  The movie plays out, you watch it, you leave, and you go on with your life.

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