Replacement Parts

Rating: 2/10 (14 August 2000)

This film reminded me of Frankenstein's monster. It's made up of discarded jokes from dead movies with a defective brain thrown in. Except for possibly the hero, Shane Falco (Keanu Reeves), the characters are cringe-producing stereotypes. There are hulking gansta-rap body guards who play offensive guards on the field (get it?). There is a Japanese sumo wrestler with a goofy Asian accent, a barmaid with a heart of gold, a blonde airhead cheerleader, and a deaf guy. The players on strike are all spoiled millionaires, toward whom, it seems, one is supposed to the feel the kind of populist resentment you hear on sports radio call-in shows. Many of the gags are familiar. There is barfing in the huddle that gets replayed on Sportscenter and a man who celebrates football glory by tweaking his nipples (remember Nipple Ring Man from "The Waterboy"?).
Although the film is loosely patterned after the NFL's strike-interrupted 1987 season, the less you know about football the happier you'll be. In the world of "The Replacements," the final game of the season takes place on Thanksgiving night. Just before this big game, with the playoffs on the line, the team fires its most valuable player to make room for a single former striker who mysteriously decides to join the scabs he has spent the whole movie harassing. Getting rid of the best players for no reason happens only in baseball, remember? The weather presents another riddle. The film is set in the Northeast in late November, but I could swear that every day was the middle of August. Al Gore must have been right about that global warming thing after all, and maybe The Replacements is a prequel to Waterworld.
One of the most puzzling scenes takes place near the end of the film. Sipping beer on his houseboat, the dejected Shane Falco watches on television as his coach gives an inspiring interview while trotting off the field at halftime. Somehow Shane covers the distance from his boat to the locker room in the time it takes the coach and the players to get there themselves. They either did some very slow trotting or Keanu reverted to his Matrix alter ego, Neo, and made time stand still.
All this could be forgiven if The Replacements was either funny or original. But in time-tested Hollywood fashion, the film merely combines the elements of other money-makers. The pitch could easily have been "It's the Bad New Bears meets Major League, with Gene Hackman reprising his coach-who-gets-a-second-chance role from Hoosiers." The practice of repackaging the leftovers from earlier films hints at timid studio executives who prefer stale but bankable ideas to original but untested ones. Good comedy demands either brains or originality, even if it's just gross-out body fluid humor. This reanimated corpse of a film delivers neither.