"Leatherheads" is a few yards short of a win

The Screening Room
Specially Written for What's Up

It’s 1925, and college football is where the heroes live. Pro football is a thing of ridicule, filled with flask-slugging, cigarette-flicking screwuppery, punctuated every now and then with a touchdown.

This is the world of “Leatherheads,” a George Clooney “starring and directed by” picture show that’s filled with the nearly funny, but never quite buys a guffaw.

Clooney is Dodge Connelly, a 40-something pro football player who refuses to let his Duluth Bulldogs go down in eternal forfeit.

So he woos war hero and college pigskin favorite Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski, NBC’s “The Office”), who incidentally finds the idea of being paid to play an attractive one.

Fans flock, sponsors clamor and Dodge chalks up plenty of tallies in the win column, and for a while, things are the bee’s knees. They are pro football players, hear them score!

But when Chicago Tribune reporter Lexie Littleton (Renee Zellweger) gets a tip Carter isn’t the conquering war hero he claims he is, she sets out to chop down his cherry tree and trade it in for the assistant editor’s desk.

Carter and Dodge develop crushes on the whistle-blowing pen pistol, and so begins the film’s ultimate match-up: the Young Buck versus the Cunning Fox with Miss Blonde Ambition smack in the middle.

The story is full of cute comedy, but falls short of outrageous humor. Calmly hued in the colors of the ’20s, it’s like the movie isn’t sure which genre it’s supposed to fall into, and so it doesn’t land in any of them.

It’s a little bit comedy, a little bit sports. It’s like the Donny and Marie of romantic football cinema.

But Clooney and Zellweger’s repartee is pitch-perfect, and just about enough to carry the film through to its final sunset scene.

It also marks the story of football, set at a time when Pig in the Pokes and Crusty Bobs are traded in for new rules and a slew of big time corporate sponsors (picture the first-ever coin toss, where the referees aren’t sure who’s supposed to call what. At least no one calls them Friendo).

Never quite side-stiching, the movie is a quickly forgotten one, feeling a little more like pleather than the real thing. But it’s enjoyable none-the-less. Clooney injects his cheesy A-list charm in just the right amount to earn a little slack for lackluster laughs, and the witty — though sedated — humor is enough to leave audiences feeling like their team may not have won the game, but the valiant attempt was A-OK.