2008 Movie No. 6: "Leatherheads"

Leatherheads is being promoted as George Clooney's take on classic Hollywood screwball comedies and to some extent it is. The ingredients are all there: the charismatic leading man, the tough-talking dame, the snappy verbal repartee and the mildly ludicrous situations they must extricate themselves from. The thing is, the movie as a whole plays like an amalgamation of one of those films with "Bull Durham" and "Flags of our Fathers." And while all the pieces work well, they don't always work well together.

Clooney plays "Dodge" Connelly, the aging star of a struggling 1920s Duluth professional football team. They're quickly running out of money and, like many of that era's teams, in danger of having to close up shop for good.

College football, on the other hand, is thriving. And the face of college football is clean-shaven medal of honor winner Carter Rutherford, a star at Princeton whose manager (Jonathan Pryce) has made sure he's splashed across every newspaper and magazine cover, and many of the advertisements inside as well. In Carter, Dodge sees a face who could draw the kind of crowds pro football could only dream of, someone who might be able to singlehandedly save the game he loves from financial ruin. In Dodge, Carter sees a chance to put off his preordained life and continue playing football. So he joins Duluth, bringing immense hype and media attention with him.

Part of that media attention comes from Lexie Littleton (Renee Zellweger), the Chicago Tribune's ace reporter who is interested less in football and more in blowing apart the somewhat dubious story of how Carter single-handedly got 30 German soldiers to surrender. It should come as no surprise that while the pair team up successfully on the football field they compete for Lexie's affections off of it.

There are a lot of interesting things going on here. The comedy often works, and it has a few things to say on how we create our heroes. And Clooney does an especially good job playing a guy who realizes that by saving his football team, he's going to be changing things in a way that makes him obsolete. The problem is, tonally, it doesn't always work. One particular screwball sequence might be amusing on its own, but it sticks out like a sore thumb and doesn't really fit with anything else around it. And that's not the only time it felt that way. It's too bad because viewing the parts on their own, this had the chance to be a great movie instead of merely a good one.