Guilty Pleasure No. 81: The Replacements (dir by Howard Deutch)

Posted on May 1, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

2000’s The Replacements finds America in crisis!

With the season already underway, football players are going on strike! They want better contracts. They want more money. They want …. well, they want a lot of stuff. Meanwhile, the fans just want to know who is going to make the playoffs. There are only four games left in the season and the Washington Sentinels need to win three of them to make it into the playoffs. The owner of the team (Jack Warden) recruits burned-out coach McGinty (Gene Hackman) to take over a team that will be made up of replacement players. McGinty says that he wants to pick his own players and he doesn’t want any interference from the team’s owner. Anyone want to guess how long that’s going to last?

McGinty’s team is made up of the usual collection of quirky misfits who show up in movies like this. Tight End Brian Murphy (David Denman, who later played Roy on The Office) is deaf. One of the offensive linemen is a former SUMO wrestler. Orlando Jones plays a receiver who has a day job at a grocery store. The kicker (Rhys Ifan) is a Welsh soccer player. (Okay, a footballer, I don’t care, call it whatever you want.) Jon Favreau plays a berserk defender who is a member of the police force. Leading them on the field is Shane Falco (Keanu Reeves), a quarterback with a confidence problem. Cheering for them from the sidelines and falling in love with Shane is bar owner-turned-head-cheerleader Annabelle (Brooke Langton). Backing up Annabelle is a cheer squad made up of former strippers, the better to distract the other teams.

It’s not often you see a film where the heroes cross a picket line but that’s what happens with The Replacements. Then again, it’s not like the folks on strike are driving trucks or unloading freight for a living. They’re multi-millionaires who want even more money and don’t even care about whether the team wins or loses. When the replacement players actually start to win games and become beloved in the city, the striking players react by starting a bar brawl. In the end, striking quarterback Eddie Martell (Brett Cullen) doesn’t even stick with his principles. He crosses the picket line and creates a quarterback controversy, just in time for the last game of the season.

The Replacements is thoroughly predictable but also very likable. The cast gels nicely, with Hackman especially standing out as the gruff but caring coach. Keanu Reeves is not totally believable as a quarterback with a confidence problem. You take one look at Reeves and you don’t believe he’s had an insecure day in his life. But, as an actor, he’s so likable that it doesn’t matter. The same goes for the entire cast, whether they’re on the playing field or singing I Will Survive in jail. I don’t particularly care much about football but I did enjoy The Replacements.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Quick Review: The Last Stop at Yuma County (dir. by Francis Galluppi)

Posted on June 2, 2024 by Leonard Wilson

This review might be a bit biased, as I’m a fan of actor Jim Cummings’ work. I loved The Wolf of Snow Hollow and his brief cameo in Halloween Kills. The moment Francis Galluppi’s Last Stop at Yuma County was released on Apple Films, I bought it. Not even a rental. At 90 minutes, it’s a short crime thriller that fits in well with those late night gems you may come across.

On his way home to celebrate his daughter’s birthday, a Knife Salesman (Cummings) arrives at a gas station in Yuma County, Arizona, only to find that the station’s gas truck is a bit delayed. He decides to wait for the truck in the the gas station’s diner. Additionally, the news on the radio is going around about a recent heist of a nearby bank. Similar to movies such as Legion or Tales From the Crypt Presents : Demon Knight, the Diner makes a great setting for a standoff when the two robbers make an appearance – played by Richard Brake (Barbarian) and Nicolas Logan (I Care a Lot). Can the Knife Salesman and the local waitress, Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue, The House of the Devil) make it through the day and save themselves?

For his first production, Galluppi handled things well, I felt. The shots are evenly paced, well lit and framed in such a way where it doesn’t feel like the camera lingers too much or is too shaky. The strongest part of The Last Stop in Yuma County are the characters. Cummings, Brake, and Logan are the stand outs, but everyone contributes to the story in their way. The film dances between drama and comedy pretty quick, which had me chucking in moments before getting jolted back to reality with the ever changing situation.

If the movie has any kind of drawback, it’s that some of the story’s elements aren’t fully closed up by the time the film ends. It’s not a terrible thing, considering where the focus of the story moves, but a little more closure would have been nice. Outside of that, The Last Stop at Yuma County is worth the watch.

Love on the Shattered Lens: Blue Crush (dir by John Stockwell)

Posted on February 18, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Released in 2002, Blue Crush tells the story of Anne Marie Chadwick (Kate Bosworth).

Anne Marie lives in Hawaii and she’s got a lot going on in her life. Because her mother recently abandoned her daughters so that she could run off to Las Vegas with her good-for-nothing boyfriend, Anne Marie is practically raising her 14 year-old sister, Penny (Mike Boorem). Anne Marie is also working as a maid at a beach-side hotel, where she and her two best friends, Eden (Michelle Rodriguez) and Lena (Sanoe Lake), spend their time cleaning up messes and trying on the guests’s clothes. I have to admit that, if I was a maid, I’d probably try on the clothes too. However, after watching Blue Crush several times, I can tell you that the last thing I would ever want to do would be to work as a hotel maid. Seriously, some of the messes that Anne Marie, Eden, and Lena had to deal with were so disgusting that I had to look away from the screen. Bleh!

Anne Marie and her two friends are also surfers! In fact, surfing is pretty much what their lives revolve around. Anne Marie has been invited to compete in an upcoming competition but she’s haunted by an incident that occurred several years before, an extreme wipe-out that nearly caused her to drown. (Despite all of the beautiful surfing footage, this film does little to alleviate my own extreme drowning phobia.) Despite Eden’s encouragement, Anne Marie isn’t sure that she has what it takes to get back into the competition circuit.

Unfortunately, there’s a group of NFL players staying at the hotel and they totally trash their room and leave a huge mess for the maids to clean up. (At one point, Lena finds a used condom stuck to the bottom of her shoe and totally freaks out. I would have to. I once moved into an apartment that was already inhabited by several friends of mine and, while I was cleaning, I came across like nearly a hundred used condoms hidden in every nook and cranny of the place. I mean, I was happy that everyone was having sex but seriously, don’t just leave your condom on the floor after it’s been used. Pick up after yourself! Anyway, where was I?) Fortunately, however, one of the players is a totally hot quarterback named Matt (Matthew Davis). Matt and his fellow players hire Anne Marie and her friends to teach them how to surf. Matt and Anne Marie end up falling in love, mostly because they’re the two best-looking people on the beach. With Matt’s support, will Anne Marie be able to conquer her fears and compete in the competition? It would be a really depressing movie if she didn’t.

So, let’s see. What do you we have here?

We’ve got lots of pretty shots of pretty people running along the beach in slow motion.

We’ve got a soft-focus love scene between the best-looking people in the movie.

We’ve got a ton of exciting surfing footage.

We’ve got a thoroughly predictable plot that still kind of works because everyone involved is so good-looking.

Yep, this must be a John Stockwell film.

Seriously, John Stockwell is one of my favorite directors because he always delivers exactly what he promises. He makes films about beautiful people in beautiful places and if that’s not enough for you, too bad. He’s a genre director and makes no apologies for it. There’s a refreshing lack of pretension when it comes to John Stockwell’s filmography and it’s hard not to appreciate the universe that he creates in films like Crazy/Beautiful, Into the Deep, In the Blood, and this one. It’s a universe where everyone knows that they’re in a genre movie and they behave accordingly. It’s a world where the scenery is beautiful, the people are attractive, and nearly every problem can be solved by a kiss or the proper one-liner.

You could probably make the argument that the storyline of Blue Crush is shallow and a bit obvious. I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with you. But who cares? Kate Bosworth and Matthew Davis have a tone of chemistry, the Hawaiian scenery is gorgeous, and well, I just kind of love this movie.