Review

Gridiron Gang
Director: Phil Joanou
Writer(s): Jeff Maguire   
Cast: The Rock, Leon Rippy, Jurnee Smollett
Genre: Drama/Sport 
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 120mins
Tagline: One goal. A second chance

Gridiron Gang’s seeming prefab movie-inspirational plot — a group of colorful, rebellious young felons at a California juvenile detention camp moulded into a winning team by their hard-driving probation officer/coach, Sean Porter (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) — was based on a 1992 documentary of the same title by the same producer, Lee Stanley. At the end, we even see brief excerpts from that doc, with the real-life Sean Porter and the players’ counterparts doing and saying some of the same things we’ve heard in the movie.
Somehow, though, this Gridiron Gang winds up seeming like shopworn cliché anyway. Is that a comment on the picture itself or on the superficial ways that most movies and TV shows incline us to view athletics and juvenile crime?
Directed by Phil Joanou, Gang is pitched as a mix of gritty street crime drama and heroic sports thriller-comedy — a kind of cross between Boyz N the Hood and The Longest Yard. It takes place at Camp Kilpatrick, an actual detention camp near Malibu, and Joanou shows these fictionalised guys in the hood — especially future running star Willie Weathers and his rival-gang foe, future defensive star Kelvin Owens — and then under Coach Porter’s hard-knuckled, warmhearted regime.
The Rock’s Sean may have an occasionally nasty mouth and a prettier face than Vince Lombardi, but here, down deep, he’s the same tough but fatherly moulder-of-men we’ve seen from Pat O’Brien’s Knute Rockne forward. Sean, a man of biceps and principle, depressed by the grim futility of the camp and the violence of the boys, decides that football is the way to turn surly young thugs into citizens. Along with sidekick Malcolm Moore, he sets up the Camp Kilpatrick Mustangs, gets them uniforms and equipment and arranges a schedule of games with top local high school teams.
Of course Sean prevails, despite scoffing and scepticism from his more cynical superiors Paul Higa and Ted Dexter, a lot of attitude from the players and a succession of bone-crunching and often bigoted opponents.
Playing Sean, the Rock commendably tries to broaden the hitherto comic-book hero range of his parts in movies such as The Mummy Returns, and The Rundown.
As sports movies go, Gridiron Gang isn’t bad, just not top-line material. Even when it plays its heart out, the clichéd environment drags it down.
— Michael Wilmington