Playing for Keeps (2012)

Playing for Keeps arrived in 2012 with Gerard Butler as a washed-up footballer coaching his son's under-tens, and it departed quickly, carrying a six percent approval rating and a spot on at least one worst-of-the-year list. The critical consensus settled on a single word for its treatment of women, and that word was not flattering. Here is a film that presents divorced mothers, an ex-sportscaster, and a wealthy man's wife as a rotating queue of seductresses, all of them converging on a man whose principal qualifications are a jawline and a Scottish accent. The classification work, in this instance, is brief.

The cast is uniformly white, and the screenplay shows no awareness that this might be a choice. No character is gay, coded as such, or given a life outside the pursuit of George. Race never enters the frame. Neither does the environment, unless we count the rain in a bonding scene between father and son. A bribe changes hands and a Ferrari gets borrowed, but the film regards money as a device for moving men between driveways, not as a subject worth examining. Nobody is fat, autistic, or otherwise inconvenient to the camera's preferences. History goes unrevised because history is never consulted.

The remainder is a lightweight romantic comedy with no message beyond the proposition that a man may be redeemed by attending a soccer match. There is no sermon, no lesson, no finger raised. The film is too muddled even to hold a thesis. Its director blamed thirteen producers for that muddle, which remains the most coherent explanation anyone has offered. We score it accordingly and move on to the next screening, weary but dutiful.