Jackson Free Press

“Playing for Keeps” is a blasé work spiked with trifling comic bits and smoothed out with a mellow dilemma that works to limp the film to a predestined conclusion of awkward family bliss.

The “Muzak” soundtrack is your first clue that this movie will be no more exciting than an elevator ride in a short building. Happy notes plunk out a schmaltzy tune to the ups and downs of George Dryer’s (Gerard Butler) regrettably, forgettable life. 

Poor George!

George messed up, although we are never told how, why, when and those other pesky details of realism to soften the cardboard character. Director Gabriele Muccino (“The Pursuit of Happyness,” “Seven Pounds”) focuses the beginning of the film on the past, where George had it all: super soccer stardom, tens of thousands of fans cheering him to bend it against Beckham and Stacie, a hot-mamma, hootchie-coochie wife with a tiny chill of sexy aloofness (Jessica Biel). There’s even a freckle-faced kid with big warm eyes (Noah Lomax).

Then, poof, it’s all gone. The fame and riches come for George, and then go away, leaving him divorced, broke and hawking his old uniforms for bargain basement prices at the local pub.

Poor George! (By this time you should be shouting this out with me). He has no job. No one wants his memorabilia. He’s locked in a dizzying point of dysfunction.

Muccino and his team work really hard to stoke our sympathy for down-on-his-luck George, but they completely and utterly fail. George still has the treadmill, an unlimited wardrobe of Adidas apparel and a vintage sports car. Where George gets his money to live in an upscale Virginia suburb, even if it is a coach house, is the only mystery going on in this film. 

George evokes a lazy form of gorgeous loser, with shiny blonde highlights in a thick mane of ever-so-manly hair. He sways into the soft-and-hairy category of loser lovers. He never gets mad, except for a throw down with Dennis Quaid’s character that is too stupid to try and describe.

Poor George! He has to duke it out with a jealous husband while his soccer team plays in the championship round.

Not the sharpest spike on the soccer cleats, George concocts a plan. Well, sort of: He acts without thinking. But it seems that George is aiming his petard toward a goal. George hopes to weasel himself back into his 10-year-old son’s life by coaching his soccer team, causing George’s ex-wife to forgive his years of thoughtless neglect. Then, they will live happily ever after. That’s the plan anyway, which goes awry when the soccer moms (Uma Thurman, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Judy Greer) line up for some shag-the-coach opportunities. (“It’s the accent,” George says to his landlord.)

Poor George! All those lovely women, and he only wants his ex-wife—who is betrothed to another. I agree with Stacie’s fiancé: What did she ever see in this guy?

Butler gives a signature performance, indulging his frisky sex appeal in a role requiring him to pose sans shirt, grow scraggly little whiskers on his chipmunk cheeks and bed all the estrogen-driven soccer moms who are bored with their dullard husbands. Butler stays within his safety zone. In fairness, the script may not have provided him with new territory to explore, but at least he got paid and didn’t have to pay for a movie ticket.

Biel looks beautiful, but tears up one too many times for a no-good bum. Stacie seems so pulled together, but she falls apart through the flimsy story, which is really only about selfish George, the king of the has-beens. 

The worst scene ever (OK, maybe not as bad as “Pluto Nash”) is when George races into a bridal boutique to profess his love. It’s a puke moment.

The kid (Lomax) is good. He’s the smartest one in a bunch of idiots and the most convincing. I have no idea what happened to Quaid, but his billionaire bullying episodes are lost in the dearth of entertainment.

This film is no more exciting than Muzak in an elevator. It ranks among the lowest of the year.