Kicking & Screaming
Two Stars
by Norman Wilner, Zap2it.com
"Kicking & Screaming" probably exists solely because someone at Universal saw "The School of Rock" and thought: Hey, Will Ferrell and kids! And they play soccer! Goooooooooooooalll!
If that made you smile, you will probably find much to enjoy in "Kicking & Screaming," which is equal parts adorable misfit kid comedy, slapdash sports movie, and one-third rambling improvisation from Ferrell as Phil, a meek Chicago suburbanite who rediscovers his competitive edge on an almost psychotic level when he impulsively decides to coach his son's soccer team.
See, Phil's ultra-competitive dad, Bart, coaches the rival team, and Phil's spent his entire life in Bart's shadow. But as Phil works to pull his crappy team into a fighting machine, something clicks over inside him, and it's not long before he's throwing back barrels of coffee and driving his young charges harder than his father ever did. That's it. That's basically the whole picture.
A savvy director might have played up the absurdity of casting Robert Duvall as Ferrell's endlessly disapproving father -- after all, he played the same role for searing drama two decades earlier in "The Great Santini" -- or had more fun with the genuinely surreal notion of Ferrell bringing aboard legendary football coach Mike Ditka as his assistant. Instead, we get Jesse Dylan, who has no savvy whatsoever; it's as though he just sets up the camera and lets it run, and whatever happens goes straight into the final cut.
Universal's DVD -- available in separate full-frame and enhanced-widescreen editions -- reveals there was a little more attention paid to the process than that, with twelve minutes of deleted scenes, five minutes of alternate takes and a nine-minute blooper reel.
The rest of the extras are a hodgepodge of featurettes aimed at younger viewers, who might be wondering what it was like for the movie's kids to hang out with Will Ferrell, play soccer all day and, in the case of the Italian kids, be flown in from Italy. There's not much here for grown-ups, but then you could say the same thing about the feature.
