If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the years, it’s that actors should usually stay in front of the camera and leave directing to those focused enough to control the magic. While the Academy has undoubtedly given unfair reward to the likes of Robert Redford, Ron Howard, Kevin Costner, and even Clint Eastwood over the years, the truth is that most actor-helmed movies are shit. George Clooney, of all people, has proven to be an incredible exception to the rule with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Good Night, and Good Luck. With Leatherheads, his attempt at a screwball comedy centered on the rough, early days of pro football, he’s fallen into the trap.
Clooney stars as the aging bad-boy player Dodge Connelly and John Krasinski as fresh-faced rising star Carter Rutherford, Leatherheads attempts to chronicle the origins of the league in a “kooky” manner meant to reflect just how crazy the times were. The idea is actually pretty good, but the execution is terrible. Clooney and Krasinski are two talented actors that I have a tremendous amount of respect for, but they feel grossly out of place in this film. Clooney’s usual charm is nowhere to be found here and Krasinski, who is consistently great as the deadpan Jim on the American version of “The Office”, is merely a bore. I don’t blame them, though. As actors they do what they can with the material. While Clooney’s direction is definitely on a different page as his actors, most of the responsibility for Leatherheads‘ failure rests with Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly’s script.
This is the kind of movie that thinks it’s a clever, brilliant throwback to classic comedies, not the kind that is. The shallow quirks are nothing more than fancy window dressing, but they’re not even enough to distract from the frivolity of the movie. Leatherheads tries exceptionally hard to be entertaining, but it never rises above its pretensions to actually say something or at least be amusing. I lost count of how many times the typically annoying Renee Zellweger uttered some variation of the line “He’ll cook his own goose,” and the predictable love triangle she manufactures between Clooney and Krasinski will have you scrambling for the eject button. No one in this movie makes any real kind of connection, so there is certainly nothing to bring the viewer in.
The quality of the special features is about on par with the movie. A handful of features are masturbatory at best, and I could not bring myself to sit through the movie again to watch it with Clooney’s commentary. Watching it again would be brutal punishment, and I do not particularly want to lose any more respect for him.
While not bad in a technical way, Leatherheads still stands out as especially awful. It reeks of the false glamour of a failed experiment, and had the approach had not been quite so half-assed, it would have been tolerable. In the state that it’s in now, though, Leatherheads has no reason to exist.
