The Keanu Reeves Project: The Replacements

THE REPLACEMENTS (2000) - Shane Falco

Just a quick note to start -

The next entry in the Keanu Reeves Project was technically a movie I'd never heard of, a small indie called "Me and Will."  Because Keanu was like 30th billed as "himself/Dogstar," I did a little research beforehand to make sure it wasn't going to be a complete waste of time.  It turns out, it would have been a COMPLETE waste of time as I found the movie available for free on Youtube and watched the first two minutes of it.  If I didn't know any better, it appears to be shot a lot like certain softcore porn movies you used to find on Cinemax at one in the morning and the fact that Traci Lords is credited in the opening doesn't help its cause.  Anyway, it turns out that Keanu's "part" in this movie is literally his real-life band Dogstar playing a song at a club.  Keanu plays bass but at no point does he speak and to be sure, I listened to a podcast about this movie and this is the only part of this movie he's in.  The fact that he's credited at all is completely misleading although I have to say, I wasn't completely turned off by the Dogstar song.  How and why Dogstar is in this movie is an unknown story, limited to the knowledge of the handful of people that made this movie as I couldn't find any information about this movie anywhere on the internet.  This reminds me a bit of an earlier entry I was forced to skip because the movie was not available anywhere on the planet except at least I know that "Me and Will" exists and definitely looked like it sucked.

DOGSTAR!

Okay, so this leads me to today's entry, the 2000 movie "The Replacements."  

Here's the thing about watching comedies from 20 or more years ago:  a lot of them don't hold up.  Perhaps it's because mainstream attitudes have changed or the jokes are topical and don't hold up, or because they really just weren't funny in the first place.  "The Replacements," while not a terrible movie, fits that bill pretty well.

Prior to my recent rewatch, I think I've only seen "The Replacements" from start to finish once, when I saw it in the theater in the summer of 2000 although I've definitely caught bits and pieces of it on TV as there was a time that it was constantly on TBS and TNT.

This movie was released in August of 2000, when I was spending my summer working at the video store, a magical place I've mentioned in at least one previous post.  The video store was a weird, weird place, mainly because we were located around the corner from a Blockbuster and that approximately 50% of our revenue came from pornography.

This is what a video store looked like!

Most of our customers at Potomac Video fit neatly into one of two categories: people that hated being emotionally assaulted by the Hellscape that was Blockbuster Video and people that rented pornography.  These two categories of people were not mutually exclusive.

While I'll save most of my Potomac Video stories for another time and place, I would like to take a moment to write about the people who rented pornography at the turn of the century.  First of all, I'm not judging these people, the year 2000 was an interesting time where porn was almost certainly available on the internet, but access to the internet was still pretty slow and who wants to try to view porn on a modem getting you 256K a second?

Of the group of people that came into my store to rent porn, they could be subcategorized into several other groups like, "Secretly Gay Married Guys," "Don't Tell My Wife I was Here Guy," "Incredibly Late Returns Guys," and my favorite "We Both Know I'm Here to Rent Porn, But I'm Gonna Put On A Show For You Anyway guys."

That last guy was the best.  During the Summer of 2000, I worked a lot of day shifts, and business was slow at that time, to say the least.  On average, I would probably get less than 10 customers in and out the door before 5PM on most days, which often allowed me to skirt the rules and toss on a PG-13 movie every now and then instead of watching "Clue" for the 300th time.  It was during those days that the "putting on a show" guys would come in.  There were only a small handful of them, but they all had the same routine:

The "Show" guy would enter my store, I'd look up and say hello to him, and both he and I knew exactly what he was there for.  But for whatever reason (I always assumed embarrassment), these dudes would always put on a show, seemingly for me and me alone, that they weren't there for the sole reason of renting porn.

They'd casually walk all around the store, picking up and putting back movies, slowly sauntering the aisles, determined to find the right movie just for them.  Then, as always, they'd make a detour over to our documentaries section.  Why documentaries?  Because the docs section happened to be right next to our "back room door" that led to the porn.

I used to love it when one of these guys would come in, spend 10 minutes browsing our new releases and head over to pick up a box over in docs about beekeeping or some shit before slinking into the back room.  I always tried to put myself in their shoes.  Maybe they really were interested in the beekeeping movie.  Maybe their thought process when they came into the store truly was something like this:

"Hey, the video store!  So many movies, so many choices!  I'm going to see what came out this week!  Hmm, this "Fight Club" movie sounds kind of interesting.  Ooh, "Mystery Men!"  I meant to see this one in theaters.  No, you know what, I think I'm in the mood for a documentary today.  What do they have on that?  Hmm, this one about starving children in Somalia looks good.  Oh fuck it, I'm just going to get porn again."

This little song and dance happened multiple times a week with four or five different guys.  I always found it hilarious, especially because nine times out of ten, we were the only two people in the store and at the end of the day, he was always going to have to interact with me anyway so what's all the show for?

Anyway, aside from the main two groups of people that came into the store we had a much smaller third group of people: video store groupies.

There weren't a lot of them, but during the summer of 2000, there were three or four different people that would just come into the store to hang out with me and my colleagues.  Using the word "colleague" to describe the other 20 year olds that I worked with sounds a little too formal but I guess that's what they were.  Most of the groupies were nice guys who just seemed bored.  But there was one in particularly whose name I've forgotten that was always a little bit odd but I feel like it actually was Bruce (a different "Bruce" than my last entry).

Without going into details because I'm already at 1000+ words without talking about this movie, Bruce was a 30 or 40 something year old guy that worked at a free clinic who may or may not have been gay and who may or may not had crushes on me and one of my co-workers at the store.

Anyway, Bruce came in one day and offered to take me and my friend at the store to see "The Replacements."  The movie was on his dime so the three of us saw it together.  I have nothing else interesting to say about this, other than that is why I saw "The Replacements" in the theater.

So..."The Replacements."  What can I say about this movie without launching into another 1000 word aside about the Washington Redskins for whom this movie was very loosely based on after the player strike in 1987?

As a very tiny bit of history, in 1987 there was an NFL players strike, and the Skins were the only team to be 3-0 with a team comprised entirely of replacement players, including a huge Monday Night Football win over the Dallas Cowboys who had about half their pro players back.  The Skins went on to win the Super Bowl that year and because the team has a long, long history of being a horrible franchise, snubbed the replacement players for over 30 years before finally giving them the Super Bowl rings they rightfully deserved.

Anyway, this was enough to inspire the movie, "The Replacements," starring Keanu Reeves and Gene Hackman.  

Do NOT confuse him with Johnny Utah

Keanu Reeves plays Shane Falco, a washed up quarterback from Ohio State (JUST LIKE JOHNNY UTAH!) who gets a second chance to play in the NFL.  To note, the league is never called the NFL because the movie didn't get the rights to it.  This is the same reason the team is called the Washington Sentinels, which is much, much better than the current name that also happens to be a racial slur.

The movie itself is pretty formulaic, except that this did (sort of) actually happen.  There are a small handful of genuinely funny moments, like a young Jon Favreau playing a deranged replacement linebacker.

I'm just not sure what this movie wanted to be - a family friendly comedy, a dramedy, an adult comedy?  So much of the humor punches down in ways that just aren't super funny in 2020 and potentially weren't that funny in 2000.  

And I have to take a minute to talk about the cheerleaders.

For some reason, not only are the players striking, but ostensibly the cheerleaders are striking too because early in the movie when the replacement players first show up to practice, the Sentinels are also having cheerleader tryouts.  Why are the cheerleaders striking?  Solidarity with the players?  We may never know.

In any case, the captain of the squad (I guess?), Annabelle, holds tryouts in one of the most cringeworthy scene of any movie I've watched for this project so far.

MAKE

IT

STOP

Seemingly, the only reason for the cheerleader side story is they needed to give Keanu a love interest, which they do with Annabelle played by Brooke Langton who I know from nothing other than this movie.  The character of Annabelle is given as much depth as a two year old's swimming pool and I almost felt bad for Brooke Langton for being given so little to work with.  She's a cheerleader and she works at a bar and she knows a lot about football, and that's enough for Shane Falco to fall in love with her.  Sure.  The entire subplot should and could have been deleted entirely.

In the end, Shane Falco leads the team to a victory that secures the Sentinels a spot in the playoffs for the pro players, hooray.

A few scattered thoughts:

*This makes the THIRD movie where Keanu plays a quarterback, joining "Point Break" and the TV movie, "The Brotherhood of Justice."  I honestly wonder how good a QB Keanu could have been.

*This is the second movie in a row with a pretty excellent soundtrack, including "Bohemian Like You" by the New Pornographers and "Unbelievable" by EMF.  I'll ignore the fact that this movie opens with the Lit song "Zip-Lock."

*Annabelle drives a lot like Keanu's friend in the much earlier film "Permanent Record."  That is to say, suicidally.  

*I don't know how many movies Gene Hackman has played a coach but that was also his role in Hoosiers.  I don't know, I find that semi-interesting.

*One of the actors in the movie plays a convict who was released from prison in order to be able to play for the team.  Not only did this actually happen in real life but that actor later killed his girlfriend and is now in prison for 40 years.  

*I caught the actor that played Stan Valchek on "The Wire" as a ref, he doesn't have any lines.

Box Office Information: $44 Million Domestic/$5 Million International for a $50 Million worldwide ($75 Million inflation adjusted domestic) on a $50 Million budget.  Well, it didn't LOSE money I guess.  It was in theaters for an average of just six weeks and was just the 56th highest grossing movie of 2000.

Rotten Tomatoes: 41% Critics/66% Audience.  This feels about right.

IMDB: 6.6

My Movie Rating: 5.5.  It's not good, it's not terrible.  I'd rather watch this again than many other movies so far and I'd say it's just slightly above average.

Keanu Rating: 7/10.  I don't have much else to say.

Up Next: "The Watcher."  I've never seen this, but I'm optimistic!