A decent sports comedy

Rating: 5/10 (11 August 2000)

"The Replacements" is a strange mix of reality, slapstick comedy, and plot lines you've seen a hundred times before that mix to form an engaging, though not spectacular comedy. Their is some decent football action, and some big laughs.
Aside from the fact that 80% of this script seems to be lifted more or less directly from the 1991 Scott Bakula vehicle "Necessary Roughness" (whose script wasn't that original itself), this movie at least had a kind of glitzed up feel that most football movies like to avoid. It didn't get down and dirty in the trenches, like so many movies before it. You'll have seen many of the gags before, but they're well-done, and there is the added bonus of Pat Sumerall and John Madden doing what I assume to be a satire of themselves (how else to explain such Madden quotes as, "He caught the ball! He doesn't usually catch the ball, but he caught the ball!"
Only two things really irked me about this movie: #1 - why the need for replacement cheerleaders? I understand they wanted to take a slightly racier angle (something lifted from "Baseketball, but used to much greater effect here), but it isn't as if cheerleaders belong to the NFL Players Association. Also, the movie has the strike occur with 4 games left to go in the season. The strike on which this is based (in 1987), happened at the beginning of the year, as do all labor disputes but baseball's. This is presumably to add the dramatic effect brought on by the hunt for a playoff birth, but that's never really present, so it I think it just would've seemed a little less silly if this was all occurs at the start of the season.
Decent acting, good football scenes, the occasional big laugh, and nothing you haven't seen a hundred times before. But still worth a watch.