We've heard it all before, that "it's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game." In Hollywood, winning is the only game in town. It's a business that can't afford to play by the simple life lessons of youth. Entertainment is a ruthless business that lives by its own set of rules. To take a cynical look at it, it's a lot like politics: it will often do anything to get your vote (i.e., your money at the box office). Ask it what it believes in and the answer is money, the lifeblood of the industry. To sell the most tickets, it frequently has to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Without money, it can't afford to make family films like "Kicking and Screaming," a Universal Pictures release about the effect that little league sports can have on suburban families.
Jesse Dylan (son of iconoclast singer-songwriter Bob Dylan), and director of the third—and one can only hope, the last—of the popular and commercially successful "American Pie" films, i.e., "American Wedding," directs the film, which stars comedic man-child Will Ferrell as Phil Weston, the easy-going son of a hyper-competitive father who takes over coaching the worst little league soccer team in the neighborhood in order to get back at his father for making his childhood miserable.
The father-son dynamic is the strongest part and primary focus of the film. Buck, Phil's father and coach of the best team in the league, claims he doesn't just coach soccer, but he "builds men," never mind that the kids are only 10 years old and aren't in any hurry to grow up just yet. Buck's parenting methods have left Phil "full of suppressed rage" with no outlet to be had—that is, until he steps up and takes on coaching himself. The implication is that somewhere along the way, sports have become an instrument of vengeance. The silver lining comes when Phil realizes that he's become just like his father and turns around and teaches the kids what it really means to be a team, a reminder of all the positive values that sports can inspire in us.
Ferrell plays his role well enough, but, like his character, he seems to be a bit too restrained, and holding back too much. Still, as in his other films, he creates a likable and relatively harmless character in Phil. You enjoy watching his character develop over the course of the film, how he interacts with his father (played by a fairly lackluster and perhaps miscast Robert Duvall), his wife Barbara (played by a suitably cute and feisty Kate Walsh), his son Sam (Dylan McLaughlin), and the individual kids on his little league soccer team. Unfortunately, aside from the father-son relationship, the rest don't quite go deeply enough. There's no "i" in team, but there is in "Will," and the film is really all about him. Everyone else gets pretty short shrift, with the exception of Buck's neighbor, Mike Ditka, who plays himself. Ditka receives almost as much screen time as Ferrell himself, and while he's quite entertaining, he feels over-exposed. Will Ferrell is the star, after all, not Ditka. We'd rather see more of the other characters, especially the kids, who never quite develop their own individual personalities—another win for the whole "team" concept. The wise-cracking Mark Avery (Steven Anthony Lawrence) and shy pipsqueak Byong Sun (Elliott Cho) deserve far more time then they're given.
The film scores with kids and grownups alike, and features lots of physical humor and jokes that aren't as puerile as Jesse Dylan's past work. This is definitely a family-oriented film, the only one that opened last weekend. It is harmless fun, if a bit uneven and too lightweight for its own good. It's really a kind of poor man's version of "The Bad News Bears," which is itself being remade with Billy Bob Thorton and is expected to be released later this year.
Perhaps coming off more "serious" work like Woody Allen's "Melinda and Melinda" has left Ferrell with the desire to return to his usual shtick. "Kicking and Screaming" lacks the edge that he brings to his other roles, which therefore makes the film more palatable family fare. While the storyline may not be terribly original, what makes it somewhat different, at least on the surface, is that it features soccer as the sport of choice, rather than baseball or football, which are more common. The film recognizes the growing popularity of soccer among American youth while exploring the comedic potential of parents who are more fanatically competitive than the children whose games they watch every Saturday afternoon.
The transformation of mild-mannered adults into stark-raving animals may not strike most people as humorous, but the filmmakers manage to make a joke about it. It is exaggerated, in the effort to help us laugh at ourselves and remember that sports are meant to be fun and that it's a game, not a war. At the same time, however, the film outright vilifies caffeine as the real source of all negative emotions and anti-social behavior, which is itself quite laughable. No Starbucks' endorsements here.
In the end, while not a great film, it succeeds in appealing to the competitor in all of us while reinforcing the values of cooperation and good-sportsmanship, and helping us laugh at how very silly we can be when we lose sight of those values.
Rated "PG," for thematic elements, language and some crude humor.
