The Game Plan (2007)

The Game Plan arrives from 2007, that placid era when a Disney family comedy could put Dwayne Johnson in a football jersey, hand him a surprise eight-year-old daughter, and consider the matter settled. Johnson plays Joe Kingman, a quarterback of towering self-regard whose bachelor existence is interrupted by Peyton, a child he did not know he had. The premise is sturdy, the slapstick is abundant, and the film's engagement with social questions is incidental. Morris Chestnut and Brian J. White appear as teammates, Roselyn Sanchez as a ballet instructor, and the ensemble is genuinely multiracial. The film never mentions it. This is 2007 Disney doing what 2007 Disney did, populating a story without annotating the population.

The closest the film comes to a thesis arrives at the ballet academy, where Monique Vasquez submits that her discipline demands the same athleticism as his. It is a pleasant point and it is made once. Monique spends the remainder of the runtime as a romantic destination, and the emotional arc belongs entirely to Joe. Later, our hero declines a twenty-five million dollar endorsement from a burger chain, choosing his daughter and his dignity. The gesture registers as a mild shrug at crass commercialism, delivered by a studio that has spent ninety minutes celebrating the quarterback's mansion, his restaurant, and his celebrity. The film is not against money. It is against money that interferes with the third act.

There is no climate anxiety here, no examination of identity, no character whose inner life requires a clinical label. The moral instruction, such as it is, arrives through pratfalls and a well-timed interception instead of a monologue, which spares us the sermon. The result is a film of low ideological temperature and reasonable commercial instincts, a product that opened at number one and earned its keep. We classify it without enthusiasm and without objection.

Somewhere in the credits, the cast performs an Elvis song, and the matter concludes with the tidy efficiency of a studio that knows exactly what it sold and to whom. The film asks nothing of the viewer beyond ninety minutes and a tolerance for montage. We have graded worse. We have also graded better, though rarely with such a clean conscience about it. The ledger closes, the lights come up, and the quarterback gets the girl, the daughter, and the championship in a single afternoon of screen time. No further analysis is warranted, and none is offered. This is cinema as comfort food, and the kitchen has no ambitions beyond the plate in front of you. We note the absence of anything resembling a thesis and move on to the next screening, where perhaps someone will have something to say. They usually do not, but hope is a professional obligation in this line of work, and we maintain it out of habit if nothing else. The Game Plan is filed accordingly, in the drawer marked harmless, and the drawer is crowded. It always has been. It always will be, as long as studios need a fourth quarter and an audience needs a nap.

We score it and we sleep fine.

{"thematic_tags": ["box_office_number_one"]}