Gorgeous George plays the field
If you've been keenly following the convergence of football, finance and the media this week, following news of Abu Dhabi United Group's signing of a memorandum of understanding with Manchester City, you'll be happy to curl up with this DVD.
Leatherheads, from actor-director George Clooney, looks at just these three subjects from the distance of a period set piece, continuing his fascination with celebrity culture and journalistic ethics. With professional football – the American variety– in the doldrums, veteran player Dodge Connelly (Clooney) hits upon a foolproof scheme – to recruit star Princeton athlete Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski) to his ailing team, the Duluth Bulldogs. The year is 1925 and Carter is the golden boy of the college league, with countless product endorsements and a reputation as a war hero.
His place on the Bulldogs would guarantee record gate receipts. Dodge blags his way into a meeting with Carter and his hard-nosed manager, CC Frazier (Jonathan Pryce), but is distracted by reporter Lexie Littleton (Renee Zellweger), who has been sent by her paper – The Chicago Tribune – to write a puff piece on the boy wonder.
In fact, her real intention is to dig beneath the surface of Carter's supposedly glittering war record, and to expose the golden boy as a fraud. Dodge falls hopelessly in love with the perfectly coiffed reporter but grows increasingly jealous of the amount of time she spends with his new signing.
But although it's got the makings of a good story, the film itself lurches across the field, frustratingly never quite managing to score.
The truth about Carter's time in the trenches pulls the film in one ponderous direction while the sparring of Clooney and Zellweger takes it somewhere else entirely.
Pryce's boo-hiss money grabber gets his comeuppance before a rain- and mud-sodden final showdown, which must have been huge fun to shoot but is a bore for us as spectators.
Clooney turns the act of staring dreamily down the lens of the camera into an art form, seducing half the female viewers before Zellweger's blonde bombshell reciprocates his advances.
There isn't much in the way of DVD extras, though, except for a few select deleted scenes.