Shameless 'Home Team' searches for a free pass
Netflix
With “Home Team” supposedly based on real events in the life of (now-former) New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton, you can really tell that Happy Madison (the Adam Sandler-founded production company responsible for glistening titles like “Hubie Halloween,” “Pixels,” “Jack and Jill,” and on and on) changed its approach to humor and storytelling. I mean, a kid saying “My butthole” is used as a punchline just three times, not nine. And Payton (played, for some reason, by Kevin James) doesn’t receive a love interest to fawn over him for no reason, only a player’s mom to embarrass herself while spouting innuendo in front of her young son.
Pff. Yeah. Despite the illusion of truth it’s the same old crap for “Home Team,” which chronicles the fallout of Payton’s yearlong suspension for Bountygate by delivering a PG-rated, accountability- and detail-free festival of kid movie clichés as Payton returns to small-town Texas to help coach his estranged 12-year-old son Connor’s (Tait Blum) team of generic goofballs. Because Happy Madison’s comic sensibility remains roughly 30 years old, one of these human delivery systems of comic relief is a heavier player on the team (Maxwell Simkins) who is always ordering pizza to the stadium. You can almost see the writers’ room napkin in which someone scribbled, “Big kid likes food, hold for applause.”
Meanwhile, the script by Chris Titone and Keith Blum takes a really modern view of masculinity as Payton nearly falls off his bar stool when served a blue cocktail and Payton’s ex-wife’s new guy is played by Rob Schneider as a thoroughly embarrassing, football-indifferent vegan who tells stories about backpacking in Asia and accidentally thinking that everyone there was a woman. Remove Sean Payton and just make this a lazy “Little Giants” ripoff starring Adam Sandler, and the movie wouldn’t be much different.
Like the usual Sandler vehicles, Payton is surrounded with people he can look down on, whether it’s a clerk at a hotel or a useless coach or any random supporting character placed there mostly to make the main character look better. James, who looks nothing like Payton and plays him like a bland imitation of every sports movie coach he’s ever seen, also gets to reunite with Taylor Lautner (“Grown Ups 2”), playing another coach who may or may not be made of wood, so we’re really going all out for acting talent here.
But all of that pales in comparison to the ways in which “Home Team” lets Payton off the hook for his involvement in the Saints’ approach of paying players to hurt people on the opposing team. It’s beyond cheap to use the suspension as the jumping-off point for the movie and then disengage with the implications of the incident on Payton’s character and the violent nature of football as a bunch of pre-teens (including a rival team who hits really, really, really hard) work on their game. Then again, perhaps a biopic in which an announcer utters the line, “The Warriors have barfed their way into the championship” is less about accuracy and depth than projecting something noxious as far as it possibly can.
D
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