Yesterday, I completed another
blogger “first”. Instead of watching a movie in the comfort of my own home, I
went to experience a film on the actual big screen. Don’t worry; this was not
my first ever trip to the movie theater. However, it’s the first time I’m
blogging about it. I spent nine dollars to sit in a musky old auditorium and
watch Gerard Butler’s newest release, Playing
for Keeps. This is a movie about a retired, washed-up soccer player who
tries to right the wrongs he’s made with his son and the one true love of his
life.
You know it’s a bad movie when the
screen illuminates the room and you catch yourself rubbing a spot out of your
jeans, struggling to pay attention to the movie. Or when you have the urge to
get up and sneak into Wreck-it-Ralph
instead. In a movie with a super star cast like Valentine’s Day or He’s Just
Not That Into You, including Gerard Butler, Jessica Biel, Dennis Quaid, Catherine
Zeta-Jones and Uma Thurman, you have to wonder how it could go wrong.
It’s a bad sign when you have to
look up the main character’s name on IMDB after seeing the movie. Gerard Butler
plays George Dryer, depicted as a pathetic “has-been.” Considering that
Butler’s true breakout role was the heart-melting P.S. I Love You, it’s increasingly difficult to watch our favorite
Scottish sweetheart sleep around and flirt with married women. One of my major
issues with the film is that George Dryer is a character who’s hard to like. In
one scene where he leaves his son at a married woman’s house to go out with
her, I questioned whether or not I’m actually rooting for George. I have always
loved Butler’s acting, and don’t think the problem lies within his performance.
This issue points to the actual writing of Playing
for Keeps. Screenwriter Robbie Fox seemed to forget one of Blake Snyder’s
golden rules: that a movie always needs to start with a reason to like the main
character.
Then we have Jessica Biel, who is
beautiful but somewhat stiff throughout the movie. After she left one of my
favorite TV shows of my childhood, Seventh
Heaven, because she didn’t like her goody-two-shoes image, I must admit
that I’ve never really liked her as an actress. However, even when trying to
come up with an unbiased opinion, I still think she lacked heart in her
performance. Near the end of the film, when she decides to leave her fiancé and
go back to the only man she’s ever loved (Butler), it felt fake to me.
Especially in “rom coms” like this one, chemistry between the two leads is
extremely important. And when the female lead is making a huge gesture by
leaving her husband, we want to be certain that their love justifies her
betrayal. Gerard Butler very characteristically brings a big personality to the
screen. Yet, Jessica Biel seems unable to react around him, and therefore comes
across as reserved when we really want her to finally let go with Butler,
something she can’t do with her fiancé. Watching chemistry taint a good idea, Playing for Keeps taught me a fuller
appreciation for good casting.
With a faulty main plotline, an
audience can only hope to rely on the tangential plotlines to carry the story.
While this is hard to pull off, it can be done with a super star cast such as
this. Regrettably, however, this is not the case with Playing for Keeps. Dennis Quaid plays this extremely strange,
aggressive soccer dad who we think should be institutionalized after the first
thirty seconds he’s on screen. And when he loans his Ferrari to Butler, the
viewers find themselves waiting for a motive that is never revealed. I became
entirely fed up with his character when Butler had to go bail him out of jail
for hitting a man Quaid thought was having an affair with his wife. This
becomes too ridiculous for me, and at moments like this I was distracted by
that spot on my jeans.
Then, we have the horny soccer moms.
The way in which these women pursuit Butler, when it is so clear he’s not
really interested, was one hundred percent unbelievable. While I’ll agree that
the soccer-moms-gone-wrong idea is clever, I was quickly annoyed by their side-plots,
and disliked Butler for encouraging them. And when the straight-laced landlord
ends up with one of these women in one of the last scenes of the movie, I
couldn’t help but gag. The Arab landlord turns to Butler and says, “You were
right about the accent.” In a moment that was supposed to be funny, the entire
theater was silent. And no, I wasn’t the only person there.
The hardest part about writing a bad
review for a movie is that you feel unqualified to be harsh. If any of the
people involved with this project read this blog post, I only imagine them
saying, “then why don’t you try to do better, see how hard it is.” However,
what sitting in the movie theater made me realize was that you don’t have to
have seven Oscar nominations to judge whether or not a film was successful. As
people got up from there seats at the first sign of the ending credits, I knew
that Playing for Keeps was,
tragically, a flop.
MOVIES WATCHED: 11
SCREENPLAY PAGES WRITTEN: 39
NOVEL PAGES WRITTEN: 65
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