In at least two ways, “Kicking & Screaming” is the oddest thing to come to family movies in a long time.
How often is it that someone in Hollywood sits around brainstorming for a Mike Ditka vehicle? “Something, anything, just get us Mike Ditka and we’re golden.” As it turns out, a couple of Chicago Bears fanatics whose adolescence was arrested sometime around the Super Bowl Shuffle era of 1985 are behind the venture. Ditka is no cameo in this flick, he’s a genuine co-star – it may rise or fall on his obscure appeal.
And since when does the international coffee promotion board get to write scripts? “Kicking & Screaming” is allegedly a Will Ferrell movie with a soccer plot, but much of it is spent in coffee shops discussing the contrasting tastes and benefits of Guatemalan Intermountain Supremo.
“Kicking & Screaming” is the sort of almost-there family movie for which half-stars exist in ratings.
It’s nearly good enough to recommend, not quite bad enough to ignore, and in the end, not so awful a place to take the soccer team to chill on a Sunday afternoon.
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The movie’s draw should have been the loopy and menacing competition between Ferrell, as a good-guy dad and budding soccer coach, and his onscreen father, Robert Duvall, who is mean enough to trade his own bench-warming grandson to the last-place team. Ferrell takes over that loser team and tries to help his son while fighting demons left over from when Duvall benched him in his own childhood.
But Duvall’s part is irredeemably cruel, and you could feel the kids in the audience staring deep into their candy bags while self-absorbed adults yapped at each other endlessly onscreen. Ferrell is funny as he becomes nearly as megalomaniacal a coach as Duvall, except by then we’ve already got one person to hate and don’t want another. Coffee is the annoying side plot, as Ferrell gets addicted and over-wired.
Which brings us to Ditka, a man no one under 15 will recognize or revere. Da Bears’ former coach plays himself, living next door in perpetual feud with Duvall. Ferrell signs him on as assistant coach, an intensity transplant for the gene he’s missing, and the cigar-chomping Ditka gleefully fills the bill.
Surprise, he ain’t that bad. His comic timing in this lukewarm script may even be better than the pros he’s playing against. When Ditka yells, you don’t really believe him, which makes him perfect for kids compared with the Duvall who bellowed “Charlie don’t surf!” and lawyered the first two “Godfathers.”
Screenwriters Leo Benvenuti and Steve Rudnick first hit the right notes of a salty-sweet family story for “The Santa Clause,” but their ear isn’t quite so well tuned here. Between laughs, “Kicking & Screaming” can stretch on like a soccer match going nil-nil. The line they return to over and over is one from the TV commercials for Duvall’s sporting goods store: “He’s Got Balls” – which, if not edited out of this review for taste reasons, will show you the movie’s lack of taste.
Still, the millions of parents going slowly insane on the nation’s soccer sidelines will recognize many characters and complaints from their own lives. Parents who want to advise but don’t want to coach, coaches who forget what it is to be a parent, worried mothers who drop off their kids and ask everyone to read the explanatory volume, “My Son Is Shy.” While not knee-slapping funny, those moments at least make “Kicking & Screaming” genuine.
And if your kids ask you who Mike Ditka is, just tell them he used to coach … um … the New Orleans Saints.
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at 303-820-1686 or mbooth@denverpost.com.
“Kicking & Screaming”
**½
PG for thematic elements, language and some crude humor|1 hour, 32 minutes|FAMILY COMEDY |Directed by Jesse Dylan; written by Leo Benvenuti and Steve Rudnick; starring Will Ferrell, Robert Duvall, Mike Ditka, Kate Walsh and Josh Hutcherson|Opens today at area theaters.
