"Everybody listen up. The Gridiron is a football field.
On the Gridiron, we do it my way, not your way.
Your way got you here. Whatever gang you claim,
whatever hood you're from, this is your hood now."
--Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, as Sean Porter,
The Gridiron Gang

Football movies are basically the same. Football is our favorite metaphor for visceral struggle, teamwork, fascist-lite rants about "my way or the highway" and selfless sacrifice for something greater than oneself. Football conveniently offers a symphony of pain to all the meatballs and D students of life, the lovable morons who need the structure of organized violence, not to mention the fantasy of being (a) the coach with the god complex; (b) the all-American quarterback; (c) the thoroughbred-like running back/receiver; or (d) the lovable goof who makes good by hitting the line with a homicidal rage and a reckless disregard for one's own spinal architecture.

Football is about the big, dumb, American fantasy of "being number one" by doing more jumping jacks than the other guy, by bonding with other men by snapping their naked flanks with a towel on their way back from the shower and by living the life of the vicarious warrior/protector whose honored position in the community is won or lost on the basis of how worked up he gets during one of those halftime rants by a coach whose real function is not to run plays that position his team's strengths against his opponent's weaknesses - but to come up with the most entertaining version of, "You jerks are blowing it! Now get out there and win!"

Gridiron Gang is an effective football film because it does the one thing we ask of the genre: It takes the same old tired cliches and weaves them together through a premise that feels new and fresh. In fact, we like our "tired old cliches" - the way we like the familiarity of TV - but only if a movie doesn't hit us over the head with them. A football film has to have something new to offer - at least on the surface. We need an angle. Without it, we just get bored. That's why the most successful football films have come frontloaded with a refreshing "what if?"

What if "teamwork" meant integrating black and white players, as well as black and white coaches? (Remember the Titans) What if "the game" were the only thing a town had to live for? (Friday Night Lights) What if the players were all second-stringers who got in because the real players had walked off? (The Replacements) What if the star were a lovably dementented retard (The Waterboy) or a midlife talent coming back to a pursue a lifelong dream? (Invincible)

Gridiron Gang mixes The Longest Yard (hardened cons as football players) with The Bad News Bears (the little-league team from Hell). Its "lovable morons" are the hardcore juveniles behind bars for violent offenses. What makes them both "lovable" and "morons" is the reality of gang violence, something even dumber than football. We can intellectually dismiss it as stupidity incarnate. Nevertheless, it has an undeniable appeal because it satisfies a set of needs, needs not met with white-bread platitudes about "flying right." In the right setting (Gladiatorland), gangs give kids a sense of protection and belonging. Their version of "Grand Theft Auto" is a game that offers the adrenalin rush of a contact sport, the respect of the warrior, a fireman's sense of service to the community and, if nothing else, something to do. After all, chicks dig uniforms, even if they're baseball caps worn sideways.

The problem is that gang life may be the ultimate video game with a vengeance. When the game ends, you don't just lose your quarter. You're dead.

For Sean Porter (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson), this is unacceptable. Porter works the main unit of Camp Kilpatrick, a juvenile detention facility in LA County. He's getting discouraged by the endless repetition of the revolving door. He's a walking Willy Horton ad flipped upside down. George H.W. Bush got elected pushing America's fear of unrehabilitated cons, thrown back on the street. Sean Porter's fear is that those same cons will be coming back to him - or ending up dead.

His solution is to use what he knows. As a former football star, he turns to football as the answer. As he tells his supervisor, Paul Higa (Leon Rippy), football may be the best fit for getting kids out of gangs. Football, after all, is gangland activity legitimized. It's violent. It involves uniforms, teamwork, a special status and a religious commitment - a sense of belonging - to the rest of the team. When Porter says, "This is your gang now," he's not just throwing out platitudes. He means it. Football, he hopes, can fill the vacuum left when we ask kids to give up their identity as "players" in the most dangerous and violent game of all.

What a perfect angle! - both for the problem Porter wants to solve as well as for the football movie. It's hard not to be cynical of football flicks' propensity to take seriously what is essentially a bunch of meatballs scrambling to grab a funny-looking ball - in between touchy-feely pats on the backside. At long last, we cynics are given a reason to take seriously the claim that the game actually matters. For the kids on Porter's team, this really is life or death. For them, all those lessons about teamwork and choices and leadership are more than just platitudes: They're the last, best, hope of making sure somebody's child doesn't end up dead on the street.

There's a great scene in the early part of the film, where the Rock goes to "the box," a phonebooth-like holding cell for the impulsively violent. He goes there to confront a young man who has just been sent off for attacking the member of a rival gang in his sleep. Some movies would turn this into "the speech," a kind of Menace2Society moment. Some would get seriously physical, a kind of Don-Johnson-beats-the-bejesus-out-of-the-bad-guy moment. Here, The Rock marches in with a rolled-up newspaper in hand - and he's not coming to read the comics.

This is an effective role for Dwayne Johnson, the former football player who once tried out for the Calgary Stampeders, before being cut by the team and turning to pro wrestling as a way to showcase his talents as a showman extraordinaire. Ironically, Johnson's fame as The Rock has made him a hero and role model to so many young minds that it's not hard to see him as a coach-like guard at a probation center for juveniles. I can't fathom the sense of responsibility that would well up in a man who wakes up one day to realize that thousands of kids hold him up as their generation's version of Superman. Johnson, who looks like an islander version of Anthony Robbins, is extremely effective in this role, even if his acting abilities are a bit limited. Only in the laughably-maudlin tearjerker scenes does he prove unable to not evoke chuckles from a cynical audience - but that's because the man's whole career has skewed toward expressing a different set of emotions. It's also because the material in these scenes is so flimsy it would terrify John Malkovich.

To buy into football's myriad cliches, you have to at least half-believe they're more than perfunctory. You have to see the cliche as more than just the lazy recitation of itself. There's nothing more annoying than a plot device that feels completely artificial, trotted out solely because the screenwriter was running through a checklist of similar schtick from another film. Veteran scribe, Jeff Maguire (In The Line of Fire) manages to give the cliches a sense of honesty by using the juvenile-offender context to make them believable. The result is a Hollywood film that does justice to Jac Flanders' documentary about the real Sean Porter and the real Kilpatrick Mustangs, identically titled "Gridiron Gang."

You can tell when a movie is comfortable in its own skin. TV and video director, Phil Joanou, gilds the lily a little more than he has to, which makes for a 2-hour film that might have felt a little tighter at 100 minutes. Nevertheless, Joanou has a discipline and cinematic good judgment that not only tells the story without trying to overly impress us ("Look, Ma, I'm a director") but actually showcases the original source material. That's a risky move Joanou doesn't shy away from. Walk The Line, by contrast, kept the real Johnny Cash out of the movie as much as possible, to help protect the illusion that Joaquin Phoenix was Johnny Cash.*

Joanou, on the other hand, ends his film by showing the audience clips of the original documentary, clips that show where Jeff Maguire got some of the film's best lines. We see the real Sean Porter, who looks more like a testerone-filled version of Herb Brooks (Kurt Russell) in Miracle - and kinda talks like him, too. Joanou's point is that there really is a Camp Kilpatrick, and there really is a man named Sean Porter, who really sees football as the way to ween kids off of gangs. That, I suspect, is the most honestly heartwarming truth of this film.

That's the way it is, or my name ain't Bill Kilpatrick.
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* I thought the strategy was unnecessary. First, Joaquin Phoenix was portraying the heart and soul of Cash. If Anthony Hopkins could do Nixon without having to look like Nixon, why should it matter? Second, since much of the film was about the young Johnny Cash, Joaquin Phoenix was close enough.

Recommended: Yes

Movie Mood: Guy Movie
Viewing Method: Other
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
Worst Part of this Film: Nothing