Rocky Plays Football

Wildcats

Directed by Michael Ritchie

At the USA Charles

WHAT DOES GOLDIE Hawn, a high-school football team, an uptight ex-husband (with legal battle over custody of the kids), a bunch of slapstick locker room gags, and an adolescent version of the Chicago Bears' "Refrigerator" get you? Not much, really.

The main problem with Wildcats is that there's nothing new in it. The plot is that same old skeleton formula that was worn out long ago: unlikely coach picks up unwilling, unruly bunch of kids, whips them up with laughs and tears, and finally they all go on to victory over the undefeatable and evil enemy at the championship game. This movie has all that, and that's about it. While other movies using the same formula have succeeded however, because of either originality or inspiration, Wildcats offers little to redeem itself from mediocrity. Witty dialogue or impresssive football footage or maybe even a passionate love angle involving Hawn and one of her players--just about anything might have done it. But no.

Instead we have the rather straight-forward tale of Molly McGrath (Goldie Hawn), divorcee and mother, who aspires to coach football in memory of her great father, The Football Coach. Of course, the only position available to her is at the nastiest school in a Chicago slum where armed guards patrol the hallways and the principal strolls with two dobermen pinchers at his side.

Molly takes the job but meets with annoyingly predictable locker room resistance from her football team; vandalized office with spray painted "Get out pussy" decorating the walls, refusing to practice, flashing genitals. Molly is daunted, thinks about quitting but is buoyed up by anger and, then, predictably, overcomes her obstacles in a manly contest of endurance, a long-distance track race in the rain with the whole team.

That over with, Molly trains the team with aerobic dance and learns to love the bunch of lower-class meatheads, even inviting them into her home.

MEANWHILE, THE SUB-PLOT unfolds, Molly's neurotic and over-protective ex-husband (Jim Keach) announces that he does not approve of her new job and the negative influence the football players have on their daughters. He tries to cajole her into quitting. Then he tries the "what about the children" angle, giving Molly a small, if cliched, emotional conflict; kids or job.

The beady-eyed ex-husband threatens to sue Molly for custody of the kiddies if she doesn't quit her position and take up something milder. He claims that her job is endangering their daughters by bringing the brutes into too much contact with them. Just so we know that choosing between job and kids is going to be hard for her, Molly says, "My kids are more valuable to me than anything." When Molly refuses to adhere to his demand that she quit, the movie gets a silly courtroom scene with big, loveable, football players blundering to the defense of Molly. At the end, Molly agrees to give up her job in order to avoid the risk of losing custody of her children. Of course, the team is dismayed and so disappointed to see their beloved coach give in so easily and abandon them.

It all comes to a fitting, and obvious climax at the league championship when, after a losing half, she renegs on her decision not to fight her husband and the team bounds to a final victory over a very evil enemy team.

SO WITH EVERYTHING tied up and sealed at the end, Molly newly resolved to fight any intrusion on her freedom, her team victorious, and her family intact, what more could we want in a movie?

Real characters might be one thing. That none of the football players are distinguished by anything other than their huge, post-puberty pectoral muscles and the slapstick amusement they provide is a real disappointment.

The movie is set in the slums of Chicago at a bitter, inner-city high-school. Certainly, this is fertile ground from which to draw interesting characters and, perhaps, even social commentary. But, instead of making any kind of statement or even really using these ingredients to create unusual characters, the makers of this movie invoke over-used stereotypes and slapstick humor. The slum high-school is just a convenient if colorful backdrop for Goldie Hawn's dizzy smile and the players simply big, nondescript things to root for.

Hawn herself plays out a stereotype in the movie, her self-stereotype. She plays a woman entering a field that is male dominated, not unlike her character in Private Benjamin, but her Molly does very little besides playing off of all the various flat and stereotypical characters in the movie. Her role requires little acting, just reacting; to her husband demanding she quit her job, to her team when they haze her, to her kid when she dyes her hair. Even her final, climactic decision to fight her husband only comes after the football team pressures her. By being, in fact, such a passive character, who hardly acts for herself, Hawn does no service to women in general, who are already trying deal with stereotypes of indecisiveness and passivity.