Inanity Strikes Apollo: The Replacements Falls Flat

Apollo's Latest Offering Not Even a Film

The underdog sports team subgenre has given several film directors a chance in recent years to indulge their demographic fantasies and assemble a sampling of overplayed stereotypes. 1989's Major League brought us, among others, a voodoo hitter who praised his doll "Jobu" before each game. The Replacements, this week's feature at the Apollo, resurrects this spirit of playful, and entirely unwitty pigeonholing.

Once the money grubbing Washington Sentinals go on strike, veteran football coach Jimmy McGinty (Gene Hackman) must gather a replacement team with enough heart to win the playoffs. He settles on Fukimo, a gargantuan Japanese tight end whose sole purpose as a character is to facilitate sumo wrestling jokes; Wilson, the sweater-vested deaf linebacker whose purpose is to show how sweet, dependable and boring deaf people are; and Nigel Gruff, a chain-smoking Welsh kicker played by some actor who may well have been Iggy Pop. Add to this a Bible reading ex-con and a childishly spastic cop (played by an ill-cast John Favreau), and you have not even a remotely funny movie.

Leading the team, of course, is down-on-his-luck ex-football hero, Shane Falco (Keanu Reeves), who also happens to be the only mentally sound white player. When he's not wooing cheerleaders or defending his teammates in bar fights, he's grappling with a fear of what he calls "quicksand," that point in a game when everything falls apart.

In a scene that was clearly supposed to be the film's emotional climax ‹ what with all the loud weepy background music ‹ Falco describes his fear of losing. In the end, it is Coach McGinty who helps him overcome it, telling him, "Winners always want the ball" to which Reeves nods and can almost be heard saying "Gee whiz."

If one were to look for a reason why this movie should exist, a possible answer might be that it is loosely ‹ very loosely ‹ based on a true story, the Washington Redskins strike from the 1987 season. However, what one finally takes away from The Replacements is the sense that no one involved in the film‹not the director, actors, and certainly not the screenwriter‹was trying. If there is anything funny about this movie, it is how freely it accepts its role as pure commercial schlock, driven by nothing but hopes of box office revenue. Such honesty can be rather refreshing. The Replacements does not pretend to be a film. It is content with being a product; one, however, that is not worth the $3 admission price.