Can you smell what The Rock - sorry, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson - is cooking?
Probably, as it's a pretty traditional recipe. Hollywood loves combining machismo with small children in order to make overarching morality plays about the life-changing nature of fatherhood. With so many similar movies flooding the Hollywood scene - "Big Daddy" (1999), "What a Girl Wants" (2003), "The Pacifier" (2005) and "Are We There Yet?" (2005), to name a few - this overused plot has basically spawned a new genre.
This time, a charismatic former wrestler and a precocious, twinkle-eyed surprise kid interact in "The Game Plan," Disney's latest cinematic equivalent to a Happy Endings sundae at Friendly's - and the No. 1 movie in the country, naturally.
In this version of what has been done a million times before, Johnson plays Joe "The King" Kingman, star quarterback of the fictitious Boston Rebels. Joe watches his own interviews repeatedly and can recite every answer from memory. His penthouse is neatly controlled by universal remote. His end zone dances are so elaborate that they cost him "excessive celebration" penalty yardage every TD.
Therefore, his beer ad, "man law" life gets totally confused when his 7-year-old daughter Peyton (Madison Pettis) shows up on his doorstep, clutching a blonde doll and an explanatory note from her mother.
Kingman, of course, didn't know about his daughter's existence due to the fact that she was the product of a final fling with his ex-wife (insert Tom Brady joke here). Mommy's doing humanitarian work in Sudan for a month, so it's time for Daddy to baby-sit.
Peyton is, ever-so-stereotypically, the anti-Joe: She listens to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. She tells stories about princess fashion. She actually knows where Sudan is. Most puzzlingly, she's named for a Nobel Prize winning chemist, not Peyton Manning.
Half the jokes in "The Game Plan" are utterly predictable; the other half involves a dog in a tutu. The movie is, however, occasionally surprising.
Joe throws himself into parenting much more than one would expect. When Peyton expresses her interest in ballet, he takes her to the Boston Ballet. When she complains about his uncomfortable but stylish bed, he fashions a room for her. But for everything the movie says about sacrificing for one's kids, it also makes parenting look disturbingly easy.
It doesn't help much that Peyton arrives at Joe's doorstep emotionally aged 35 and sturdy enough to handle the sudden fame that comes from having a football star father.
The movie is greatly buoyed by its likable cast. Johnson is an over-the-top caricature of ESPN bravado. Newcomer Pettis flounces her Halle Eisenberg curls and saves her intelligent little ballerina character from being too cloying or manipulative (and given some of the kid's actions, there is definite danger of that). Kyra Sedgwick, Joe's female Scott Boras mega-agent, strays far from her "Closer" (2004) role.
Most of the best lines go to Joe's teammates, some of whom actually look like they could be real football players. (Brian J. White, the entourage's standout, actually played for the Patriots.) Morris Chestnut also steps in for good measure as a wide receiver who was born to wear "#1 Dad" tee-shirts.
"The Game Plan" scores in its winning depiction of Boston. Thankfully, no characters are forced to artificially drop every "R." Director Andy Fickman instead focuses on general and basic truths about the city (i.e. Locals love sports! The seafood's great! The traffic isn't!).
The movie peacefully exists in the Hub without forcing the fabricated Beantown attitude of so many other films down audiences' throats. It's Boston to be sure, but its ambience is less overpowering than the smell of the seaport district on a late summer's afternoon.
"The Game Plan" would be less cloying if it weren't so formulaic. There's the obligatory "change the channel to a little kids show during a crucial moment in a sporting event" scene, the "out-of-control suds" scene and the "What do you mean you mistakenly ruined my [insert name of prized material possession here]?" scene. The gang's all there.
Somehow, however, the fact that this movie has its own consciously prewritten game plan to follow doesn't hinder its innate charm.
