Running time: 113 mins. Comedy/Romance. George Clooney,
Renee Zellweger, John Krasinski, Jonathan Pryce, Stephen Root, Wayne
Duvall, Peter Gerety. Director: George Clooney.
EVERYBODY
loves George Clooney but public affection for the
actor-writer-director-producer will be tested - though not too
strenuously - by this uneven screwball comedy.
Leatherheads
marks his third directorial outing, and is far lighter in tone than
Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind or Good Night, And Good Luck, recalling
the old-fashioned studio pictures which paired Spencer Tracy with
Katharine Hepburn, or Clark Gable with Joan Crawford.
Clooney
and Renee Zellweger are the standard bearers in this 1920s-set battle
of the sexes, and there's an undeniable appeal to the characters'
flirtatious banter.
However, screenwriters Duncan Brantley and
Rick Reilly don't arm their love-struck protagonists with enough snappy
one-liners to maintain a brisk tempo.
Dialogue certainly
warrants an appreciative smile ("Everything runs in your family, Ralph,
except your feet") but rarely do these cute verbal exchanges approach
the crescendo of, say, His Girl Friday or It Happened One Night.
Crucially,
the third point of the romantic triangle, a dashing poster boy played
by John Krasinski, is a bit of a drip, who doesn't pose a realistic
threat to Clooney's chances of sweeping the gal off her heels by the
end credits.
With professional American football in the
doldrums, veteran player Dodge Connelly (Clooney) realises the days of
his team, the Duluth Bulldogs, are numbered.
So he seizes upon a novel idea: to recruit star Princeton athlete Carter Rutherford (Krasinski) to the squad.
Carter
is the golden boy of the college circuit, who regularly attracts crowds
of 40,000 ardent fans, with a reputation as a war hero to boot. His
attendance would guarantee record gate receipts for the Bulldogs.
Dodge
manages to sweet talk Rutherford's hard-nosed manager, CC Frazier
(Pryce), but is distracted by plucky reporter Lexie Littleton
(Zellweger), who has been despatched by her paper, The Chicago Tribune,
to write a puff piece on the boy wonder.
In fact, she secretly intends to expose Carter's supposedly glittering war record as spin.
Carter signs on the dotted line and begins a record-breaking run with the Bulldogs.
Meanwhile,
Dodge falls hopelessly in love with Lexie but grows increasingly
jealous of the amount of time she spends with his fresh-faced new
signing.
Leatherheads continues Clooney's fascination with
celebrity culture and journalistic ethics, forcing Lexie to choose
between her front page and the future of Krasinski's good guy.
The
truth about Carter's time in the trenches pulls the film in one
ponderous direction while the love-hate sparring of Clooney and
Zellweger takes it somewhere entirely.
The leading man turns
the act of staring dreamily down the camera into an art form, seducing
half the female audience with a beatific smile well before his co-star
reciprocates his interest.
Pryce's boo-hiss money-grabber gets
his comeuppance before a rain-sodden final showdown between the two men
on the football field, which must have been huge fun to shoot but is a
bit of a bore for us as spectators. | 
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