PLAYING FOR KEEPS

Cole's Rating: ★ ½

Jesse's Rating: ★★ ½

Year: 2012

Cast: Gerard Butler, Jessica Biel, Dennis Quaid

Genre: Comedy/Romance/Sports

MPAA Rating: PG-13

        Playing For Keeps is constantly being advertised and promoted. Because of all the hype about it, I decided to watch it, as I was anticipating it to be great. The film is about Gerard Butler who plays a out-of-a-job ex-soccer player who tries to connect with his kid, of whom his ex-wife, played by Jessica Biel, has majority custody of. He does this by coaching his soccer team and trying to spend quality time with him. There are many new movies that I am disappointed with because I was expecting them to excel. But I really wasn’t expecting Playing For Keeps to be one of those.

       Dennis Quaid and Uma Thurman co-star in the film and incorporate one of the dumbest subplots I’ve seen in a film so far. Just because Gerard Butler has long hair and an accent doesn’t mean every woman that is a parent of a child on the soccer team will automatically fall for him, and seduce him. But I guess I’m wrong, because that’s exactly what happened. The reason for that being that the plot itself wasn’t enough for the film, so they needed to throw in some inadequate, poorly developed characters to drag out the already too long film.  

       Character development and motivation is a problem for many films including this because when filmmakers want their characters to do something, it’s not always easy to have that make sense to the viewers. And so many parts in this movie had that problem. No information was given on Jessica Biel and Gerard Butler’s relationship. Why did they fall in love? Why did they divorce? I can firmly state that I’m not the only one who had that question after watching the film. The Story Of Us is a fleshed out, fully developed, enjoyable movie that has very real life, fully developed characters. Every single action in that movie was completely understandable because of the information we were given in the “Story”. Playing For Keeps is a movie that was meant to tell a story, not describe a scene.

       The movie tried to do something similar to what Life As We Know It did. At least it modeled itself after something good. This, however, took it farther with the relationship between Butler and his kid, which to me was the best thing about the film. And as far as entertainment goes, the movie provides, but not all the way through the lengthy 105 minutes. So to anybody who asks for a shorthand review of the movie: The trailer was better than the film.

Written by Cole Pollyea