Playing For Keeps dissolves into formulaic drivel at nearly every turn. Gerard Butler, Scottish accent in tow, plays George, a retired soccer star who begrudgingly takes over coaching his son Lewis’s lackluster soccer team. He’s got nothing better to do since he’s unemployed and living in his ex-wife’s Virginia town to be close to Lewis, who is, incidentally, rather dull for a screen kid. The fun is supposed to start when a bevy of excited soccer moms (Catherine Zeta-Jones, Una Thurman, and, for extra comic relief, Judy Greer) throw themselves at George like they’ve been drugged.
Greer, a silly Suzie, goes first and shows up at his apartment, where she, er, takes control. Zeta-Jones makes Greer look passive. She just happens to be a self-assured former sports broadcaster with connections. Knowing the way to a man’s heart, she promises George, an aspiring soccer commentator, that she’ll get his audition tape to ESPN on the condition that they have to run to an abandoned studio and produce one together. Unsurprisingly, the tape isn’t all they produce. Third in line, and the best, is Uma. George has been warned by her back-slapping, rich husband, Dennis Quaid, that she’s a little frisky and Quaid is prone to go nuts on whatever guy might be tempted by her. Naturally, George comes home one night to find Uma has somehow broken into his place and awaits him in his bed in her underwear. Here he goes from his normally passive lunk to a downright infuriated victim. Thurman seems to really be enjoying herself in this lascivious role. For a moment, so are we, but then she’s offscreen and we’re back to the rest of this lot.
If this all sounds like a lot of prurient piffle for a film that still wants its Bad News Bears main plot, there’s more. As beautiful as these babes are, George is impervious to their charms. You see, he’s still in love with his ex-wife, Jessica Biel, who, wait, just happens to be getting ready to remarry. Her betrothed is a strictly white-bread-and-jello kind of guy. George, of course, will come to demolish him. Here we’re reminded that something like ninety-nine percent of Biel’s filmography consists of total or near-total duds. She continues the tradition by bearing witness to a lot of insipid, forced feats by George to win her back.
The movie so often jerks back and forth between farcical sex comedy, boy/dad soap opera, and hokey romantic comedy that there is whiplash to be had for all. Some will call this misogynist in its portrayal of these women who act worse that horny guys. Maybe so, but Thurman and Zeta-Jones and Greer all have a twinkle in their eye that they know exactly what they’re up to here. They seem hellbent on saving Butler and the film’s director and screenwriter from the film’s overtly treacly elements. No matter how you cut it, the film’s cloying sentimentality is more offensive than all the girls’ silly sexual horseplay combined.
2 Uma Thurmans versus Inept Plotting and Hackneyed Concepts (out of 5)