Home Team – Film Review

Two years after NFL head coach Sean Payton (Kevin James) is suspended, he goes back to his hometown and finds himself reconnecting with his twelve-year-old son Connor (Tait Blum) by coaching his Pop Warner football team.

Whoa. What’s this? A Happy Madison movie that isn’t a complete trainwreck?

I know, I know. It’s hard to believe it, but it’s true. Charles and Daniel Kinnane‘s Home Team is actually one of the better movies from the Happy Madison production company in quite a long time and is without a doubt one of the least insufferable ones out there period. There’s honestly only one or two scenes in this film that are absolutely awful. The rest of the time, Home Team sadly only settles for mediocrity despite it having many scenes where it could have truly shined.

Chris Titone and Keith Blum‘s script never really dares to do anything interesting or diverting, sadly. It’s not awful by any means, though. It’s just an extremely formulaic movie that quite literally uses almost every sports movie trope imaginable. And honestly, I can’t help but wonder if there’s still a big crowd of sports movie lovers because I don’t think I’ve ever met somebody in person or even had a conversation with someone online who is obsessed with these kinds of sports films.

Sure, I know that some people do love these kinds of movies but are they really anybody’s favorites? Titone and Blum could have crafted a script that did some bold and unpredictable things for this genre, similar to 2020’s The Way Back starring Ben Affleck. On the surface, that film looked to be just like any other sports drama but it turned out to be a hugely different film than everybody was expecting.

But I have to be honest – it’s genuinely strange to watch a Happy Madison movie and not feel terrible inside. This movie isn’t even all that bad. It’s just predictable and does absolutely nothing new. I’m surprised that Kevin James aka the king of starring in garbage, wanted to be a part of this movie because it doesn’t utilize any of James’ traditional character traits. He always likes to play the bumbling but lovable idiot in almost every movie and yet here, he’s not a bumbling idiot.

Is he lovable here? Eh, I guess that depends on who you ask. He’s basically just a guy trying to do what’s right and make everybody around him proud, but especially his son. This makes it easy to root for him because we actually get to learn a surprising amount about him in the script. Everybody’s favorite (or least favorite) werewolf actor Taylor Lautner is also in this movie and he does a shockingly great job here.

He’s never been a bad actor, but I’ve never seen him deliver a seriously solid performance. But here, in the role of Troy Lambert, he managed to take me by surprise. Is he Oscar-worthy here? No, absolutely not. But he most certainly did exactly what the script asked for him to do and he did a great job of doing exactly that.

All in all, I was surprised by how not terrible Home Team was. It’s still not a good movie but seeing as how this was made by one of the most awful comedy production companies of all-time, this could have been a heck of a lot worse.