STUDIO: Universal
RELEASE DATE: September 23, 2008
STARRING: George Clooney, John Krasinski, Jonathan Pryce, and Renee Zellweger
WRITTEN BY: Duncan Brantley & Rick Reilly
DIRECTED BY: George Clooney
FEATURES: Picture in Picture
Visual Commentary with Director George Clooney and Producer Grant Heslov
Feature Commentary with Director George Clooney and Producer Grant Heslov

Didn't you think Leatherheads was going to be a bigger hit? George Clooney was as big as he has ever been, riding the massive acclaim and awards for Michael Clayton, John Krasinski was a TV star looking for a breakout romantic comedy to take him to the next level, and Renee Zellweger usually thrives in romantic comedies. But Leatherheads kind of fell flat. It wasn't a total disaster. More of a shrug of a film, a movie that wasn't really well-liked by critics or audiences and kind of came and went with more of a whimper than a bang. Now that the film has been released on Blu-Ray, it's time for people to reassess Leatherheads. Does it deserve to be so unsummarily tossed on the scrap heap or could this be a cult comedy in the making, a movie that people will be surprised didn't garner a bigger following when it was first released? The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. What Clooney does with Leatherheads isn't completely without merit but the film never quite comes together, nailing the period recreation but missing the heart of the characters and often flailing too wildly in tone. People say all the time that it's "good enough for a rental" and that faint praise is probably true for most people with Leatherheads, a movie that's hard to hate but also just as difficult to fall in love with either.

Clooney, who also directed for the first time since his great Good Night and Good Luck, stars as Dodge Connelly, an over-the-hill professional foot player in an era when the sport didn't get much respect. College ball was big and one of the stars of his school team, Carter Rutherford (Krasinski) gets recruited by Dodge to try and form the first respectable pro team. A feisty reporter (Zellweger) gets in the way both on the field and off, as she turns the teammates into instant rivals. Leatherheads is part screwball comedy from the '40s, part romantic comedy from the same era, and part sports movie without ever really developing any of those three parts. Just as the romance starts to get interesting, Clooney and writers Duncan Brantley & Rick Reilly spend too much time on the sports scenes. And the film never quite hits the screwball comedy tone of yesteryear that it is so clearly striving to match. It feels like a film made in the '00s when it would have been refreshing to truly see what this generation's Cary Grant would have done with a classic comedy in the vein of Philadelphia Story or Bringing Up Baby. Leatherheads wants to feel old-fashioned but it feels like modern people trying to be so. However, the ample charms of the cast go a long way in alleviating the pain of the screenwriting missteps and the design of the film is gorgeous.

Of course, when you have a film this lavishly designed and shot the only way to watch it is on Blu-Ray. Universal hits the mark again with its 1080p HD Widescreen 1.85:1 video transfer, truly one of the best that the studio has yet released on the format. They may have backed the wrong horse in the next-gen format war but now that they've made the leap to Blu-Ray they haven't missed a step. The sound is well mixed in English DTS-HD. It's not remarkable enough an audio track to truly stand out but I also didn't notice any significant problems. What I am truly loving about Universal's Blu-Ray releases is U-Control, the feature that allows you to watch behind-the-scenes featurettes and interviews without leaving the film. There's not a lot of it in Leatherheads but what is there is interesting. Finally, fans of Clooney will enjoy the commentary track that can also be viewed visually through U-Control. For some people, any excuse to see Clooney is a good one. And, for many people, Leatherheads will fit the bill for comedy on Blu-Ray, even if it's not quite the movie it could have been or what we thought it would be.