American Underdog (2021)

The Beginning Zone

“If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time.”

-Zig Ziglar

I don’t talk about this a lot, and certainly not in such a public venue, but I think about giving up film criticism several times a week. After nearly a decade of writing about movies here, and discussing them on my YouTube channel, I have amassed more than a thousand written reviews; hundreds of podcasts; untold hours of great film conversations with friends, colleagues, and filmmakers…and none of the money, accolades, or widespread recognition that we’re all told will follow if we just work hard enough and follow our dreams.

“Why keep at it?” you may wonder.

The answers are too varied to shoehorn into an already inartful movie-review intro, but the top two relate directly to Andrew and Jon Erwin’s American Underdog.

First, my wife would kill me if I stopped.

They say that behind every great man is a great woman, and that cliché is definitely true in my case. Years of downtown screenings, missed bedtimes with the kids, pre-sunrise hours banging away on a keyboard or talking into a camera—it all adds up to a pursuit that sometimes forces us to question my life’s priorities.

But she believes in my dream (sometimes more than I do), and if I were to scuttle everything I/we have built for reasons as lame as a lack of dollars or clicks, my own shame would pale in comparison to the decades of disappointment daggers she’d surely hurl my way. My wife didn’t marry a quitter.

The second reason I don’t throw in the towel is that I love what I do. Even if Kicking the Seat were to go dark tomorrow, I would still watch movies, think about movies, annoy my friends and family with movie talk, and pine for a creative outlet through which to channel this lifelong obsession. The dirty little secret about film critics is that we are (generally) not an unimaginative cadre of naysaying trolls who derive pleasure from hating everything that everybody else likes. We’re a passionate, excitable bunch who sometimes take our art beyond seriously (hence thinking “too deeply" about comic book movies).

We come at long last to American Underdog.

Full disclosure: my knowledge of football comes from half-remembered sports movies and about five pre-pandemic annual trips I would take with my father-in-law to watch the Fighting Illini get curb-stomped in Champaign-Urbana—and even those were more about bonding over stadium brats and hot chocolate than anything having to do with the actual game.

So, yes, my knowledge of Hall of Fame quarterback Kurt Warner comes exclusively from the Erwin Brothers’ movie. And that’s okay. The film’s central theme is belief, and I want to believe that the version of Warner embodied by Zachary Levi is a real guy—even if creative license and human nature suggest that his story is, at least to some extent, too good to be “true”.

It should come as no surprise that American Underdog is a “God” movie. It was created by the Erwin Brothers and producing partner Kevin Downes through their faith-based entertainment production company, Kingdom Story. If that conjures up notions of preachiness, a TV-quality budget, and acting that sweats liquid cheese, I assure you this movie stands tall among the secular blockbusters that will vie for box office supremacy on Christmas Day.

Instead of approaching the material from an overtly religious angle, screenwriter David Aaron Cohen (working from the book “All Things Possible” by Warner and Michael Silver) focuses on the human brand of belief—both in oneself and in the potential of others.

We watch Kurt Warner grow from childhood dreamer to benched also-ran at the University of Northern Iowa. After training and struggling for a shot at the NFL, he lands a record-quick one-day stint with the Green Bay Packers. Not long after, he winds up working at a local grocery store, doubting he’ll ever appear on the Wheaties boxes he’s paid to put on shelves.

Had American Underdog just been about Kurt’s gradual rise to fame, there wouldn’t be nearly as much to write about. We’ve seen that movie. What we haven’t seen (or at least I haven’t) is a football movie that’s more concerned with the “Why” than the “How” or the “When”. Kurt’s “Why” changes when he meets a single mom named Brenda (Anna Paquin) at a country-western bar. He’s as immediately smitten as she is skeptical. Her son, Zack (Hayden Zaller), after all, is legally blind, and she doubts any man would be interested in taking on that kind of double-baggage.

Kurt persists, growing closer to both Brenda and her kids, and they eventually become a blended family. Times get rougher, though, between mounting bills and waning quality time together. Kurt soon takes an offer to play Arena League Football for Jim Foster (Bruce McGill*), a quirky visionary in his own right who believes people will pay good money to watch a show that’s more spectacle than sport. For Kurt, the cash bonuses begin to outweigh the embarrassment of not playing “real” football, and soon the Warners are making their way up from the depths of near-bankruptcy.

I won’t go further into the events of the film except to say that, sure, even non-sports folk like me can guess where Kurt’s journey is headed. This isn’t the dire awards-season fare that ends in suicide, destitution, or a third-act wedding between Kurt and some rival team’s wide receiver. American Underdog is as earnest and traditional an underdog sports movie as its title and poster suggest.

But that doesn’t mean it’s boring, bad, or even skippable. I’ve read some coverage complaining about the film’s predictability and the Warner character’s lack of growth. On the latter point, I can only guess that these critics had either stepped out to do laundry during the second act or turned off the film after twenty minutes and wrote their reviews based on the trailer.

Kurt’s trajectory is only predictable because a family film has been made about it. Cohen and the Erwins remind us that the world is full of stories we never hear about, of people with big dreams and bigger hearts who overcome decades of disappointment only to face greater disappointment—and who channel that passion into building lives that are no less worthy than the fraction of the top one percent who gain renown. American Underdog doesn’t hang on a couple of obstacles and a “big game”; it’s fueled by perseverance through a barrage of Job-like challenges and a cosmic beneficence that ultimately grants our hero his wish.

Like their spectacular Christian-music documentary, The Jesus Music, which came out earlier this year, the Erwin Brothers infuse American Underdog with a relatable spirituality that illustrates the appeal of faith without resorting to heavy-handed proclamations or judgment. To look at the on-screen chemistry between Levi and Paquin is to remember that unabashed, big-screen romance and devotion have been absent for far too long. To consider the friendships and mentorships that Kurt cultivates through his often rocky career is to recall the famous poem, “Footsteps”: rather than manifesting out-of-nowhere miracles, God “carries” Kurt Warner through the hard times by providing a support network of similarly good-hearted people.

If that last sentence made you vomit, there’s probably little I can say to convince you that American Underdog is worth a watch. Some people will always be too cool for Sunday school.

But if you hunger for the occasional (or, in my case, frequent) reminder that the pursuit of dreams often builds character and community in ways that can be more enriching than any lofty goal (or, as John Lennon put it, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”), you can’t do much better than American Underdog, one of the year’s most beautiful**, rousing, and inspiring films.

(Okay, Spider-Man: No Way Home is pretty rah-rah awesome, too. Make it a double-feature and emerge from the theatre extra-pumped.)

* In a fun turn of events, McGill and Dennis Quaid both appear in American Underdog, and were also featured in Julio Quintana’s Blue Miracle earlier this year—playing similar characters.

** “Beautiful” is one of those figurative, highfalutin, movie-review words, but I mean it literally in this case: There’s a natural disaster scene in the middle of the film that my eyes simply couldn’t fathom. It didn’t look like a case of CGI compositing, nor could I believe the Erwins had had the budget to stage Roland Emmerich-level destruction. It’s a poignant surprise in a movie full of poignant surprises.

Extra! Extra! Watch Ian’s conversation with American Underdog producer Kevin Downes, and his September 2021 interview with Jon and Andrew Erwin about The Jesus Music!

You can stream American Underdog right now on VOD, and own it on home video beginning February 22, 2022!