Movie Review: The Game Plan

September 30, 2007

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The Game Plan amounts to little more than a vanity production for Dwayne -The Rock- Johnson. It is an amiable enough movie and ought to give warm and fuzzy amusement to kids 8 and older, even as it will appear utterly contrived to adult eyes.

Handsome and likable in action flicks, Johnson has a long way to go before he can carry a light comedy easily on those huge shoulders. Luckily for him, little Madison Pettis, a gap-toothed charmer, plays his 8-year-old daughter Peyton — a surprise package who turns up at the deluxe Boston bachelor pad of star quarterback Joe Kingman (Johnson), aka “The King” (Elvis is his idol).

Note that the movie runs a little long for younger kids and includes brief scenes that gently imply heavy team partying, but in no detail. There are also hints that he has a girlfriend who sometimes stays overnight, but also with no detail.

Other themes involve a child’s fear of parental abandonment, grief and loss over a parent, and a child’s life-threatening reaction to a food allergy.

Monumentally egotistical and nearly friendless, Joe has a tough time adjusting his media-centric lifestyle to accommodate Peyton. (He also never thinks to take his bulldog out for a walk — a logic boo-boo that’s distracting.) The little girl arrives unaccompanied and tells Joe her mother — his long-ago ex-wife — is off on a charity mission to Africa and dropped Peyton in Boston to stay for a month with her long-lost father and to study ballet at a top-flight school. This is not at all credible — but hey.

Joe’s agent (comically greedy Kyra Sedgwick) finds the girl an inconvenience, but a teammate (Morris Chestnut) knows Peyton will be Joe’s redemption. Then there’s the head of the ballet school (Roselyn Sanchez) who’s never heard of the hotshot jock and forces him to appear as a tree in Peyton’s dance recital. The film does a service in showing ballet is as athletic as football.

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