Rotten Tomatoes score: 0%
Wow, I don't think we've had a 0% here before. To be fair, that score is only based on five reviews, which Rotten Tomatoes deems insufficient to derive a meaningful score. But I think the handwriting's on the wall with this one.
It was written and directed by Holly Goldberg Sloan, who also wrote Angels in the Outfield. Apparently this was a source of enough pride to warrant a mention on the DVD cover to the left. The movie's biggest star is Steve Guttenberg (thanks, Springfield Stonecutters), and it also features Olivia D'Abo from The Wonder Years. Also present is Jay O. Sanders, who played the spiteful, unpleasant, heartless, vindictive, nasty, obnoxious sportscaster in Angels. He plays a bad guy.
The kid taking a soccer ball to the groin in the poster is Patrick Renna, who played the chubby redheaded boy in every other kids' movie in the early 90s, including The Sandlot. Another Sandlot kid, Chauncey Leopardi, is also in this somewhere.
The movie takes place in Elma, a Texan town so tiny that it doesn't exist in real life. The opening scenes smother the audience in evidence of what a run-down garbage dump the town is. Anna Montgomery, a young English schoolteacher, arrives in town just in time to see a group of boys covering themselves in Cheetos and allowing wild pigeons to swarm them. Anna teaches the "big kids" at the local school, which means a motley collection of 12-year-old kids whose pastimes (in addition to feeding pigeons) include belching the alphabet and spewing self-deprecating dialogue about how they and their town are utterly God-forsaken.
Aside from the kids' rarely-seen parents, the only other living creatures in the town are a goat and a hapless blowhard of a sheriff named Deputy Dawg. After hitting on Anna, Deputy Dawg finds himself roped into helping her start a soccer team.
Now, I want to direct your attention to a 1991 episode of The Wonder Years, in which Kevin takes up the game of soccer. The episode contains this comment from the narrator: "This was 1971. Soccer hadn't yet become the national pastime it is today." This movie, on the other hand, would have us believe that in 1995, children in a small Texas town have never even heard of soccer. Nevertheless, Anna signs her entire class up to play a soccer game in Austin the day after she meets them.
The game is against the Knights. They're coached by Jay Huffer (Jay O. Sanders), one of those kids' movie coaches who are unabashedly evil. He mocks the Elma team for having small children and girls on their team, and after the game, he leads his boys in a cheer: "Two four six eight, who do we decimate?" I have to give the movie credit for taking this cliché to such a ludicrous extreme. Just to show us how sinister Jay is, he tells a bartender that he's an IRS auditor and loves his work.
The team regroups, and throughout the second act the players improve while experiencing various personal problems. Young Juan joins the team against his mother's wishes, and we later discover that she is in trouble with INS because of a forged social security card. Another team member, Kate, is dealing with an unemployed drunk for a father. And Larry the goalie faces a common childhood problem: hallucinating monsters on the soccer field.
(Actually, Larry calls them "monsters," but really he just hallucinates that the opposing players morph into their team mascots.)
In spite of this very debilitating condition requiring urgent psychiatric attention, Larry and the Big Green manage to jump into second place in time to face off against the Knights in the championship. During the big game, the Knights pull into an early lead, but Drunk Dad shows up to encourage Kate. Meanwhile, Jay assures his team that this game is "certainly the most important moment of your lives."
Deputy Dawg shows up with Juan and his mother towards the end of the game, having solved all of their legal problems off-screen. Juan manages to tie the score, sending the game into a dramatic shootout. The shootout goes on for hours and hours, but eventually Larry overcomes his hallucinations (actually he somehow causes the shooter to hallucinate) and an 8-year-old kid wins the game for the Big Green.
This victory precipitates an over-the-top triumphant music cue, and Jay has to kiss a goat because of a bet he made with Anna. (If he's such an irredeemable monster, why in the world does he feel compelled to honor this trivial bet?) Deputy Dawg and Anna share a forced, passionless kiss of their own, and the credits roll.
This movie is very bad. Some of the scenes with Jay are pretty funny, because they're so shamelessly absurd. In fact, Jay's character almost crosses the line into parody, and if the whole movie had taken that approach, I think it might have been pretty funny. Instead, what we get is a below-average entry in a genre that has very little going for it anyway.
Still, as bad as it is, surely it doesn't deserve a 0%.
Did you know?
Olivia D'Abo was in a movie called Kicking and Screaming. But no, it's not the soccer movie by that title with Will Ferrell; it's something else I hadn't heard of. Also, she played Natasha Romanov in the cartoon version of the Avengers.
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