Great Scenes in Meh Movies: "The Replacements"
There's a specific kind of movie magic that can show up in mediocre movies. It's that few minutes of unearned brilliance you sometimes find buried in a two-and-a-half-star stretch of nothing special, a moment so good it almost, almost, justifies the ho-hum characters or paint-by-numbers plot.
Not every mediocre film has one, but many do. It could be a fight scene, a bit of dialogue, a tracking shot. It's a moment where you can feel exactly what the director was going for, even if the rest of the film just didn't quite work.
I spent years getting paid to spot what people wanted to watch, first at Yahoo, then at Netflix, and mostly what it taught me is how to find the one good thing in a pile of noise. Which is also, these days, the whole internet's business model: nobody watches the movie, they watch the fifteen-second clip.
Example: The Replacements. It's a perfectly average, not-terrible sports comedy: a post-Matrix Keanu Reeves stars as washed-up QB Shane Falco, recruited by Gene Hackman to lead a scab team after the "real" players go on strike. To keep it from being Just A Football Movie, there's a romance subplot with Brooke Langton as a cheerleader-slash-bar-owner named Annabelle.
She likes Falco and Falco likes her, but you know how it goes in rom-coms — the dummies won't admit it. Anyway, that subplot is where the scene lives. Falco and Annabelle are in an empty bar when "Every Breath You Take" by The Police starts playing. It's standard-issue will-they-kiss setup.
Ah! But then the voices of the late John Madden and Pat Summerall start narrating the romantic moment like a football broadcast with Falco visibly trying to work up the nerve.
Pat: What do you do here, John?
John: You go for it, Pat. You have to.
Pat: But Falco's been shut down by this defense all afternoon.
John: All it takes is one big play to get him back in the ball game. (Falco leans in for the kiss.)
Pat: And here goes Falco.
John: Falco scores! Falco scores!
There's just something so cool and playful about the scene. Not to mention gutsy. It must have felt like a huge risk to the filmmakers, laying commentary from two broadcasting titans over a cinematic smooch, but damn it, the gamble pays off.
I couldn't tell you if Keanu's team won the championship, or whether Hackman gave an inspired halftime speech (probably, and also probably). I don't care. One scene ate the whole movie, and to this day, whenever anybody mentions great movie kisses, I automatically think of, um, John Madde
