2008 | Andy Fickman | 110 min | U
While this isn’t the sort of film I often watch it is the latest film I saw on DVD so I may as well start my blog off here. The Game Plan is the latest film to star ex-WWF/E superstar Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson (and is apparently the last film in which his credit will include ‘The Rock’), it’s a pretty different affair to the last film I saw him in - Richard Kelly’s baffling Southland Tales, a film that, when it ended, I couldn’t decide whether I had actually enjoyed it or not, but I digress.
The Game Plan has Johnson playing star quaterback Joe Kingman who is still looking for that elusive trophy ring late on in his career, so he obviously needs to stay focused, which will be pretty difficult when all of a sudden an 8 year old girl shows up at his door claiming that she is his daughter and that her mum has gone off to help Sudanese kids for a month, so she has to stay with him. Of course up until this point in Joe’s life he’s never had to worry about anything apart from football, himself and his ego, so cue clashes of personality (he needs rock music while working out, she needs classical while practicing ballet etc etc), his greedy agent constantly trying to get rid of the kid and plenty of predictable jokes stemming from the fact that Joe is a “mans man” having to raise a kid and helping her practice ballet.
However, don’t think for one minute I didn’t enjoy the film for there are plenty of jokes that an adult will find amusing, and obviously enough love, happiness and rainbows as can be expected from a Disney film for kids, on top of that Johnson is finally starting to look like a credible actor, no Oscars are to be expected any time soon but you can start to forget that he was most famous for raising an eyebrow and dropping an elbow only a few years ago. I do feel there could have been some more on screen character development (for instance that of Johnson’s and Sanchez’s characters), but that is a problem I doubt the main audience of this film will have a care about, especially if it meant there was more screen time devoted to Spike the dog in a pink tutu. As I said the film was fun and I was never expecting a thought provoking or life changing piece of cinema, I knew what I was getting into when I popped the DVD in the player and while I’m in no rush to see it again the creators must be congratulated for making a film that it’s target audience will find thoroughly enjoyable, but that adults could quite happily watch too.
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