Lambeau “Coach” Fields is pathetic. He has the distinction of being the worst coach in the history of sports that anyone can recall. However, though seemingly hopeless, he is convinced by fellow coach Freddie Wiseman to return to the field for one last shot. Assuring his long-suffering wife Barb that he will not ignore his family, Coach moves them to Plainfolk, Texas, where he hopes to redeem himself and his reputation. However, as coach of the Heartland State University football team, he is saddled with a bunch of misfits, most of whom don’t know the first thing about how to play the game. It’s up to Coach to use his unorthodox methods to whip this group of rag-tags into shape - both on and off the field...

Released as The Comebacks in the USA, the film has been retitled Sports Movie for the British market, presumably in a bid to associate it with the success of other recent genre movie spoofs such as the Scary Movie series, Date Movie and Epic Movie (indeed, this DVD is also being issued in a box set called The Spoof Movie Collection alongside Date Movie and Epic Movie). Fox’s disdain for the British market is evident in the fact that no one even bothered to replace the film’s original title caption - instead the words “SPORTS MOVIE” appear at the bottom of the screen in the form of a subtitle.

In fact, this picture has practically no connection with the above named genre spoofs, coming as it does from the producers of Wedding Crashers (Peter Abrams, Robert L. Levy and Andrew Panay) and the director of The Hot Chick (Tom Brady).

Unlike the Naked Gun and Scary Movie franchises, Sports Movie mostly sticks to its chosen topic and doesn’t wander off into other genres just because the subjects in question are currently popular and/or the writers have thought of a joke about it. Movies lampooned here include Bend it Like Beckham (soccer), Field of Dreams (baseball), Blue Crush (surfing), Stick It (gymnastics) and The Longest Yard (American football). The predominant sport is American football, but screenplay writers Ed Yeager and Joey Gutierrez also cover boxing (by casting Carl Weathers of the Rocky series as Freddie Wiseman and by including a rather obvious joke about Sylvester Stallone’s age in Rocky Balboa), tennis (in a rather more amusing scene involving a decidedly masculine Venus Williams) and horse racing (in a genuinely hilarious sequence that is more soggy biscuit than Seabiscuit).

As played by David Koechner (Anchorman), Lambeau “Coach” Fields is a lovable loser, in the grand tradition of American comedy. Like Homer Simpson, he has a devoted wife (Barb, played by Monk and The Office’s Melora Hardin), who you can’t help thinking is too good for him - though she does tire of her husband’s obsessive behaviour before the end.

Though far from being in a league of its own, this film is reasonably amusing and you do end up caring about the characters and wanting the team to win when, against all odds, they make it to the South-Southwest Conference Championship. There, as is customary in the sports movie genre, they must face their fiercest opponents yet, in this case the Lone Star Unbeatables, and the question raised in every great sports picture must be answered: who will win the final showdown?

The DVD has a decent number of special features, including a director’s commentary in which Brady downs a lot of booze and demonstrates a sardonically laidback attitude to the movie’s modest box-office takings. Curiously, no theatrical trailer is presented here, but there are about half an hour’s worth of featurettes, mostly involving the actors goofing around (and with pun titles that Mad magazine would be proud of!) and deleted and extended scenes (some bits of which made it into the movie’s end credits).

It’s worth giving this DVD a sporting chance.

4

Richard McGinlay