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2 stars (out of four)

Tragically, “Leatherheads” is just OK, though the film may well find an audience among those eager for a little diversion, what with the nostalgia factor and the George Clooney factor. Clooney, who directs and stars, has what it takes to pull off the kind of old-school comic dash most contemporary actors find elusive. Like Cary Grant in “His Girl Friday,” he’s both clown and stud, a classier example of the movie stardom Burt  Reynolds embodied, occasionally, a generation ago. But Clooney’s third directorial effort, following “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” and “Good Night, and Good Luck,” is sidelined by a script that plays like an imitation of another era’s artifacts. It’s an oxymoron: a mild screwball romance.

Writers Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly, who used to work together at Sports Illustrated, set their story in 1925, the year Harold Lloyd redeemed his manhood on the gridiron in “The Freshman.” Clooney plays Dodge Connolly, ringleader of the scrappy, financially challenged Duluth Bulldogs football team. Dodge is supposed to be the “old man,” the one we’re supposed to believe could never, ever get “the girl,” even a brash, open-minded tootsie such as newspaperwoman Lexie Littleton, played with a perma-pucker by Renee Zellweger.  John Krasinski  of “The Office” plays the Bulldogs team savior, a college football star recruited by Dodge to legitimize and glamorize the flailing Duluth franchise. It works; the people come. But Lexie’s assigned by the Chicago Tribune to get the real story on this alleged World War I hero, whose heroism may not be entirely legit.

It’s a promising set-up. For a while “Leatherheads” coasts on atmosphere and Clooney’s artful mugging, and on the elegance of its production and costume design (strange thing to say about a football movie). Then you start getting restless. The points of this romantic triangle never quite meet, and the screenplay fails to mine the early scenes devoted to the team’s rough-and-tumble style for more than the occasional chuckle. By film’s end we’ve seen the passing of an outlaw era, yet little has been made to matter, either dramatically or comically. And while director Clooney shoots some of the visual gags with panache—there’s a nice bit involving Krasinski accidentally lighting his shirt on fire—the climactic game is almost willfully limp. Confusing, too. At least one other person at the “Leatherheads” screening was equally flummoxed about what was going on with a key reversal.

Can the movies ever return to the golden age of screwball? This film, nice but dullish, suggests a no. The frustrating thing about “Leatherheads” is that its writers have studied all the right playbooks, and in interviews Clooney and his screenwriters have cited everyone from Howard Hawks (“His Girl Friday”) to Billy Wilder to a passel of 1960s and ’70s inspirations ranging from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” to “Bound for Glory.” The phony-heroism theme belongs to Preston Sturges’ “Hail the Conquering Hero,” while some of the film’s later scenes featuring Peter Gerety  as the pro football commissioner recalls the darker shadings of “The Natural.” (Randy Newman scored both “The Natural” and, in a more antic vein, “Leatherheads.”)

It’s a question, then, of amalgamating all those disparate influences into something new and viable. “Leatherheads” doesn’t have the knack or the energy. Too many big scenes, such as a speak-easy brawl or  prolonged fisticuffs  between Clooney and Krasinski, grind on without much purpose. And not everybody seems to be acting in the same movie; in a key supporting role as the college boy’s snakelike agent, Jonathan Pryce is dead weight, while Clooney practically kills himself trying to pep up the proceedings he knows, in his heart, are not proceeding at quite the right pace, with quite the right tone, and with quite enough of what used to be known in Hollywood as “jokes.”

mjphillips@tribune.com

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