Review: The Comebacks

Here's what really kills you about The Comebacks. There isn't a fatter, riper target for parody than the inspirational sports movie genre. From its mid-1970s-to-late-1980s heyday when Rocky and Chariots of Fire won Best Picture Oscars, uplifting jock melodramas have been just asking to get head-slapped and smash-mouthed.

And with all that fat, ripe stuff to assault, the best they can do to Rocky in this Scary Movie-esque pastiche of sight gags is have a geriatric Balboa clone literally knocked into dust with one punch? The false teeth falling in the cup doesn't make it any better. Nice try, gang.

But clearly the people behind The Comebacks mean for this to be a labor of love for sports uplift. It is, after all, about the redemption of a loser; in this case, one Lambeau Just call him Coach Fields (David Koechner), shown distracting Bill Buckner from the Red Sox dugout with a crossword question just before a crucial ground ball in a crucial World Series game.

Koechner, everybody's favorite supporting lout in doofus movie comedy, is the right man to undergo humiliation after humiliation as he struggles to coach the woeful Heartland State University football team to respectability. Among the reprobates he's saddled with is an egocentric receiver (Jackie Long), who collects cheerleaders and My Little Pony dolls, a trailer-trash quarterback (Matthew Lawrence), whose beer-swilling dad (Nick Searcy) does drag acts at truck stops, and a mentally challenged sideline rover named iPod (Jermaine Williams). Worse, Fields' onetime assistant (Carl Weathers) is now coaching his school's toughest rival.

You'll be goaded throughout The Comebacks to think of Bend It like Beckham, Remember the Titans, Rudy, Hoosiers, Field of Dreams and their ilk. What you also think about is how much this stuff worked better in Airplane! or Blazing Saddles. Keep your head down, your expectations low and, maybe, good things will happen. We repeat: Maybe.