Opens August 11, 2000

It's fourth and forty in these guys' lives, and time is running out. The slapstick, inspirational story about a bunch of has-beens and never-weres in professional football who are given one more chance in 1987 when the players went on strike, The Replacements is a Bad News Bears/Mighty DucksRocky all padded out in professional football gear.

It's comedically based on the unlikely three-wins finish that a bunch of "replacements" made with the Washington Redskins, vaulting the team to the playoffs. With enough crunches and grunts to stock a sports highlight film for a month, this seasonal silliness scores enough laughs to put it in a league with most beer commercials aired during football games on ESPN. If you like that Bud Lite commercial of the guys in the locker room hiding the beer from the coach (the one guy with the guy in the whirlpool with the hot dog), this is the movie for you. If you don't know what I'm talking about, get your nails done instead. Also, it's clearly not the type of movie that the twits and dweebs who write "film criticism" for a living will recommend, especially when there's so much sensitive tripe looming on the fall horizon.

Cinema scholars among you may recognize similarities to The Longest Yard way back when Burt Reynolds led a bunch of prisoners to a big game against the prison guards. Of course, that team was loaded with psychos, bad attitudes, flakes, muscleheads and all the wonderful kind of underdogs we movie fans cheer for when they're pitted head-to-head against the big, bad authority figures. The filmmakers here run, basically, the same story play here, as the hastily-assembled team is a bunch of wackos, ex-cons, knuckleheads, and non-conformists who, owing to some sort of idiosyncratic defect, never were able to put it all together to make it in the NFL.

In this series, the Washington Sentinels team, like most of the professional football league, strikes en masse. Even by the standards of modern-day professional athletes, these guys are a bunch of prima donna, self-centered bozos - especially irritating is an arrogant quarterback who would make even Dan Marino seem modest. The grizzled, conniving owner (Jack Warden) brings in a well-traveled head coach (Gene Hackman) who's down and out because he's clashed with the vanities of superstars and landed on his butt. But, he's crafty and he wangles the promise that he be given total control over selecting his players. Especially, Coach wants Shane Falco (Keanu Reeves) a former Ohio State quarterback who never lived up to his potential. Shane's (Keanu Reeves) now living in the bay, scraping barnacles off yachts and guzzling beer trying to forget his "glory days."

With some sweet-talking, sarcasm, Coach gets in the guy's head and convinces him to give it one last shot, promising muscle up front for protection and some fleet dudes outside who can get open and with the right stick-em maybe even catch the ball. Naturally, the defense will be loaded with more psychos and anti-social types than you could normally encounter in a major studio's boardroom.

Well, the story cadence goes according to general sports-saga form: boy-gets-football/boy-loses-football/boy-gets-football-back kind of story where the team of misfits and eccentrics comes together, falls apart, and then rallies in the end.

You'd have to go to Oberlin or one of those other small-town, smarmy and ultra-PC liberal arts colleges that turn their noses up at athletics to think the football in this football story was anything realistic: It's stylized comic mayhem and pretty funny stuff based, naturellement, on the head-butting, trash-talking nature of the sport itself. There's even some sensitivity heaved in when Mr. Quarterback, and the head cheerleader come to spark: Recall your high school days (if it doesn't make you puke) and remember what went on between Mr. Jock and Ms. Sweater, and you've got the subplot here.

In general, the narrative play calling fits the bill, with screenwriter Vince McKewin mixing it up with comedy, sharp action bursts and even an end-around or two. Director Howard Deutch keeps things moving at an apt two-minute drill pace.

Among the players, Keanu Reeves is well cast as the fast-gunning qb character, aptly named, Shane. To boot, Shane's a lefty and there's nothing better, in so far as respectable outdoor activities go, than to watch a southpaw spiral on a fall afternoon. Reeves, who's got the perfect Kenny Stabler urge to light up, shows the two-minute grit of a guy who can hang one out on a hangover. Gene Hackman, outfitted in a tight little straw hat (kind of a mix between Bear Bryant and Tom Landry) brings the right, as they say in the locker room, "intensity," while Orlando Jones, as latter-day Bob Hayes is great as the team's fleet-footed, butter-fingered, way wide-out. Michael "Bear" Taliferro and Faizon Love, as a couple of music industry bodyguards, doing line duty here are just the kind of guys you'd like in your posse when you cross paths with Puff Daddy or drop back in the pocket.

As you'd expect in this kind of cinematic delicacy, it's the second-unit stuff that's most interesting as opposed to the so-called, human drama: The hits, catches, jukes, shots and misses that make for the real action are the movie's highlights, and second-unit director Allan Graf nails it all. And, of course, the cheerleaders are the same kind of major asset they always are in real life. All down the line: They're a bunch of strippers culled from the local t & a joint who do up front and out there what the USC Song Girls will study and polish into their little routines a few season's from now.

Great football music here, and we're not talking the University of Wisconsin Marching Band. There's David Bowie with "Heroes" ("Just for one day") and the Stones' You Got Me Rockin' that crack back perspective on the inner angst of these All-Madden kinds of guys.