I decided to check out Leatherheads even though I'd heard little about it. By this I mean I knew of its existence but heard no talk of it at all. No good word-of-mouth or complaints whatsoever. It’s as if anyone who saw it had nothing to say. Probably because the movie isn’t really bad, but it’s not great either. I guess it’s just kind of ok.
In 1925, Jimmy "Dodge" Connelly (George Clooney) wants to be a professional football player. Trouble is, there’s no such thing in Duluth, Minnesota. When Dodge bumps into reporter Lexie Littleton (Renée Zellweger) doing a piece on college football hero Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski), he decides the star athlete is just what the game needs to finally be taken seriously.
This is the kind of movie you watch when you’ve seen everything else or because you’re looking for something to do for two hours but don’t want to commit to anything big. I guess the story here is alright - the idea that professional football was once a joke and teams struggled to raise enough money to pay their players is interesting. Clooney is charming as the rogue-ish character - he always is. What Leatherheads lacks is any reason for you to become interested in Lexie Littleton or Carter, whom she suspects is actually a fraud. She’s a female reporter in a man’s world... and that's it. There aren't many sparks between Zellweger and Clooney.
I’m sorry if I don’t have much to say, but that’s kind of what watching the movie is like. It's neither uninteresting or badly made; it’s just kind of there. I enjoyed the ending, predictable as it was and there are times where it crackles to life. The period-piece setting does occasionally make this feel very much like an old fashioned romantic comedy, with some slapstick-y humor and a lot of banter going quickly back-and-forth between the leads. Maybe the whole movie was like that and the lack of chemistry between them, or the overall meandering tone just drowned it out. I laughed more than I didn't. I’m leaning towards the more positive realm of “average”.
At no moment did I dislike Leatherheads. There were simply too many scenes where which left me indifferent. It’s the kind of movie you end up watching with your elderly parents or grandparents because it’s totally inoffensive, light to the point of risking between caught in an updraft and if they for some reason don’t want to watch it anymore and turn it off, you’re not losing much. It isn't bad but neither is it memorable.
