Oh good, I said to myself, another football movie, my single most favourite sub-genre of the entire sports movie oeuvre, which also includes the baseball movie, the basketball movie and the Olympic bobsledding movie. Upon closer inspection though, I noticed that Leatherheads was the new movie from George Clooney, who’s easily impressed me with his first two directorial outings. Plus, it’s a period football picture… hence the title. I enjoyed the trailer enough to include Leatherheads on my list of films to see this year back in January, but as a football movie it really works better as a romantic comedy.

Semi-based on true happenings, Leatherheads takes place in 1925 when a handful of loosely run, poorly funded teams are what constitutes professional football. Jimmy ‘Dodge’ Connelly (Clooney) is one of the last holdouts believing that there’s a big future in a pro-league, so he concocts a scheme to bring college football attendance numbers his game. Enter: Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski), a war hero, Princeton quarterback that’s already got endorsements and a cult of fandom. Reporter Lexie Littleton (Renée Zellweger) is covering Rutherford for the Chicago Tribune. Her orders are to build up the hero before taking him down, which is too bad because Lexie would rather trade verbal jabs with Dodge than follow the mission plan.

Like the fine work of Preston Sturges and W.S. Van Dyke, Leatherheads desires to be a romantic comedy of the screwball variety. In fact, football almost seems as an afterthought as Clooney and Zellweger trade zingers a la Nick and Nora Charles, except that this isn’t exactly The Thin Man. The rapid fire dialogue works well in certain scenes, but it’s not quite sustained throughout the entirety of the movie, which becomes fairly distracting. The romantic comedy manages to supersede the football in terms of scripted priority and actually that’s okay because the game scenes are actually fairly typical of sports movies with underdog players going against the rules to play their game, their way.

Even the cast is so-so. Clooney and Zellweger can be pretty good together at times but, and I’m sorry to say this, I think that they might be too old for their parts. Clooney, at nearly 47, is hard to believe as a football player of any sort outside of a fuszball table, even though he has just enough ruggedness to nearly get away with it. Krasinski, meanwhile, seems a little out of place as a football/war hero. Maybe it’s because I’m incapable of separating him from his TV personality of The Office’s Jim, but honestly he seems even less likely to tuck in as a football hero than Clooney. Also a little out of place is Jonathan Pryce as Rutherford’s manager; I’m afraid is accented English is just too much of a square peg in firing off these lines of dialogue.

On the one hand you have a movie that’s bright and funny with a little bit of energy; on the other you have a confused collision piece of conflicting tones and styles with some occasionally glaring miscasting. There’s too much romance to be appealing to football fans and there are too many football scenes to keep rom-com patrons interested. It’s a fascinating experiment, and I’m giving it a mild recommendation, but overall it is a bit of a misstep for Clooney’s burgeoning directorial career.