Kicked in the head

George Clooney’s third outing as a director, “Leatherheads,” returns to his love of period pieces and Hollywood throwbacks. This time, though, Clooney tries (too hard) for laughs in his weakest performance to date behind the camera.

Clooney stars as aging professional football player Dodge Connelly in the infancy of professional football. At the time, the real gridiron stars are collegiate athletes who, after their four years of sports glory, graduate and get real jobs that pay.

When Connelly’s Duluth, Minn., football squad teeters on the verge of bankruptcy, he enlists the help of college football’s best player Carter Rutherford (John Krasinksi, “The Office”) to ball, in hopes of filling the stadium and his pocketbook. Lady journalist Lexie Littleton (Renée Zellweger) is assigned to the new sports beat and adds firecracker sex appeal with her sharp tongue and storied legs.

Co-written by longtime Sports Illustrated “back-page” columnist Rick Reilly, the film’s premise about the legitimization of professional football in Prohibition-era America shows promise. Seeing players play both sides of the ball, smoke cigarettes during time-outs and trounce around mud-pit fields is not only fun, but oddly educational.
Randy Newman’s original score is pitch-perfect, and the writers capture the spirit of the country using football as a lens. The story falters, though, when Hollywood’s brightest star attempts to translate it to the big screen.

The use of the ’40s-era Universal production logo foreshadows Clooney’s obsessive borrowing from the best movies of that time. Drunken bar fights that culminate with both parties singing sailor tunes and masquerading in police uniforms add humor to the movie, but it’s nothing original.

Littleton’s often lame pseudo-’20s dialogue (“Cook his goose”? Come on.) is forgivable, but Clooney’s performance is not. We all know Clooney is a hell of an actor, but every moment he’s on screen, he’s either physically overacting – he and Kransiski punch each other in the face for at least two minutes – or he’s attempting to carry the movie with his sly, sexy screen presence.

It’s as if Clooney has no faith in the director and feels like it’s up to him to save this movie. Oh, wait – Clooney is the director. Is this really the final product of the man who gave us “Good Night and Good Luck”?

“Leatherheads” is neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but I think it’s fair to expect more from a director of this stature. Clooney downgraded his Writers Guild of America membership after the organization refused him a writing credit for his work on the movie’s script. Apparently producing, directing and starring in this screwball imagining of 1920s-era America wasn’t embarrassing enough.