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Plot Summary
George (Gerard Butler) is a retired soccer pro whose glory days are behind him. Burnt out on his playboy lifestyle and bankrupted by a string of bad investments, he moves back to Virginia to reconnect with his estranged ex-wife (Jessica Biel) and neglected son (Noah Lomax). Making up for lost time, George starts to coach the boys' soccer team. But can he keep his eyes on the goal when the bleachers are stacked with sexy soccer moms and desperate housewives?
Credits
Director
Screenwriter
Rotten Tomatoes Movie Reviews
TOMATOMETER
4%- Reviews Counted: 85
- Fresh: 3
- Rotten: 82
- Average Rating: 3.4/10
Top Critics' Reviews
Rotten: None of it is especially credible or engaging.
Rotten: Playing for Keeps takes place in a tonally incoherent universe, constantly shifting between rom-com farce and mawkish family drama.
Rotten: At some point you hope [Butler] will find a movie that will give him the right material to make hearts truly beat faster.
Rotten: I'll long be haunted by Dennis Quaid's manic performance as a palm-greasing dad who seems to be under the influence of bath salts ...
Customer Reviews
ROM-COM FILMMAKING AT ITS WORST
Poor Gerard Butler. No matter how hard he tries, he can never seem to reach the same attention or success that "300" gave him back in 2007. Now it seems his main career focus has turned to starring in cheap, formulaic rom-coms just to grab an easy paycheck. And sadly, "Playing for Keeps" is without a doubt the worst movie he's ever been a part of. And that pretty much goes for everyone else in the cast, which includes Jessica Biel, Uma Thurman, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Judy Greer, and Dennis Quaid. With such a solidly assembled cast, it's a shame that their talents are wasted in an uneventful story that makes no attempts at humanizing its characters or even giving us a reason to care about them. They're just attractive, soulless "protagonists" who do nothing but act like self-entitled, unsympathetic idiots for nearly two hours. It doesn't help that the flick is full of lazy, overdone clichés like the annoying little kid who inexplicably feels abandoned by his father and the divorced couple that unrealistically gets back together by the end of the film. What's even worse are the hideously cringeworthy scenes in which Thurman, Zeta-Jones, and Greer (who all play soccer moms who cheat on their husbands) literally throw themselves at Butler's unlikable protagonist to have meaningless sex with him. All the while, the movie constantly switches from being a raunchy farce to a family sports drama to a sappy love story with some of the worst execution I've ever seen. And I don't even wanna go into detail about the unbearably annoying score that literally replays over and over in every scene. Case in point, "Playing for Keeps" is a tonally inconsistent mess with no mind or heart of its own. It shamelessly steals from nearly every single rom-com cliché in the book, all the while trying to disguise itself as a sweet, feel-good romance that "means well". Even considering the fact that I watched it for free on an airplane isn't enough solace to make up for the minutes I wasted watching it. Please, if you have a functioning brain, don't subject it to this sentimental trash.
Move reviews = spambot problem
Apple movie data crew - you need to run some cleanup for stacked reviews - this "ROMCOM" review set is full of them. My bet is that if you ran a basic filter for common phrases across all of your listings (say by a certain film company) you'd find the same words/sentences in many many of them. Probably a hired gun spamming company stacking reviews - you can see a potential indicator of it in this one by comparing your ratings for those for rotten tomato - they just don't sync up.
Horrible movie
This movie was truly awful.. Don't do it to yourself.
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- $12.99
- Genre: Comedy
- Released: 2012
- © 2011 Playing Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.