Looking for a way to rebuild his relationship with his son, he gets roped into coaching the boy’s soccer team. But his attempts to finally become an “adult” are met with hilarious challenges from the attractive “soccer moms” who pursue him at every turn. — From the press notes to “Playing for Keeps.”
‘Playing for Keeps” is a “chick flick” in which Gerard Butler attempts to be a “romantic leading man” when we all know he needs to be in a leather “mankini” thrusting spears into rib cages and howling at the gods.
Butler plays George, a former soccer star who is now broke in Virginia, where he is an erratic but big-hearted dad to 9-year-old Lewis (Noah Lomax), whose mom (Jessica Biel) is preparing to remarry. Considering that she spends most of her time getting plastered with George, staring lovingly through rainy windshields at him and expressing chagrin at the way the ladies in town want to jump his bones while panting like overheated bulldogs, it seems fairly obvious where this movie is heading.
George apparently lost millions on foolish business ventures, which should have given a small portent to whoever financed this doomed movie. So he’s no longer such an appropriate husband for Biel’s Stacie, who openly yearns for the days when he could afford to take her to Italian villas. She regains interest in him again when his broadcasting audition tape gets noticed by ESPN, which might want to take him on for his soccer commentary. Assuming he gets paid $100 a minute for his work, this seems to herald a monthly income of roughly $200 given the quantity of soccer news on that network.
Until the inevitable conclusion, mostly the movie is a dull sex comedy about lusty housewives hurling themselves at George, whose best shot at employment is probably reinventing himself as a man whore. Yet George seems oddly neutered. Catherine Zeta-Jones, Judy Greer and Uma Thurman are constantly pressing up against him, showing up at his house after midnight and sending him late-night propositions via e-mail. He barely reacts to any of this. Thurman even shows up in his bed in her undies, and he keeps a respectful distance. How did Lewis get conceived, anyway?
Thurman’s character is married to a local backslapper (Dennis Quaid), a rich guy who gives George a wad of money to buy his kid a starting spot on the team and inexplicably loans the jock his Ferrari so the movie can kill time on some wacky movie behavior with the car, which George teaches his son to drive.
But the boy-dad bonding is no funnier or more convincing than the sex-farce scenes. “Playing for Keeps” is one of those movies that comes “straight from the heart” — the heart of the hack screenwriter’s manual that pushes formulaic structure to cover up a lack of compelling characters, genuine emotion or actual humor. This is an excellent way to get your script approved by studio execs who think the public can’t tell the difference between an “actual movie” and a “rancid piece of garbage.”