Rating: 3 Pulses

Rated PG-13

Leatherheads, a light comedy starring its director George Clooney, comes off as a film that was far more fun to make than it was to watch. Clooney tries his best to recreate the look and feel of some of his past films and characters, namely the inimitable brothers Coen.

The sepia-soaked story follows the feeble state of professional football in 1925. Clooney plays the leader of the Duluth Bulldogs, Dodge Connelly: the same quick-witted smooth-talking role he’s been perfecting for over a decade. However, the writers of Leatherheads, while providing plenty of throat-slitting comebacks for Dodge’s femme-foil Lexie Littleton (Renee Zellweger, looking more than a little like Jennifer Tilly), seem to have trouble capturing the essence of Clooney’s character as well as the Coen Brothers.

The writers also missed an opportunity for hilarity by giving co-star John Krasinski so little to work with as the college ball sensation and supposed war hero Carter “Bullitt” Rutherford. Maybe it was just a case of poor casting, wasting Krasinski’s casually comedic cadence on such a square of a character.

This sentiment pretty much sums up how I felt about this movie. I wanted it to be funnier than it was, and it seemed to be trying awfully hard, making its failed jokes fall that much harder. George Clooney’s motivations for making this film seem to be his love for pre-WWII hairstyles and a sense of humor that can be summed up as “Gee, didn’t folks (blank) comically back then?”

A style of comedy based on anachronistic reactions from the audience creates a movie that is a caricature of the times it portrays. It is only during a few scenes where this sense of humor is eschewed for male vs. female verbal boxing matches, evoking the classic His Girl Friday, that the film really excels, though as I stated before, the majority of the laughs come at the expense of the male contenders.

To me, the oddest feature of this near-miss was its strange propensity for talking about football rather showing the characters actually playing football. Sure the uniforms look funny, but the lack of rules allows for some questionable plays like the Crusty Bob and the Pig in the Poke, neither of which are shown.

I honestly cannot think of any other movie that is about football that would appeal less to fans of the sport.