112 min | PG | December 25, 2021 | Lionsgate
Kurt Warner stocks grocery shelves for minimum wage and insists he belongs in the NFL. He is right, and the climb from the night shift to a Super Bowl is one of the great true sports stories. The movie about it plays as safe as a kneel-down.
Kurt Warner stocks shelves at a grocery store for a few dollars an hour. He believes he belongs in the NFL. Everyone around him has stopped believing it for him. American Underdog tracks his climb from undrafted afterthought to Arena Football League quarterback to Super Bowl MVP. The Erwin Brothers build the film as an inspirational sports biopic with a faith spine, and it never deviates from that blueprint. The result hits every beat you expect in the order you expect them.
Zachary Levi plays Kurt Warner with earnest, open-faced decency and a grin that rarely breaks. He is likable. He is also two decades too old for the college scenes, and the film asks the audience to ignore it. Anna Paquin plays Brenda, a divorced mother of two and former Marine, and she gives the film its only real friction. She plays Brenda guarded and tired, a woman who has been let down before and refuses to be let down again. Dennis Quaid plays Rams coach Dick Vermeil with gruff warmth, and Hayden Zaller plays Brenda’s blind son Zack with unforced sweetness that the script leans on hard.
Andrew and Jon Erwin direct from a script by David Aaron Cohen, Jon Erwin, and Jon Gunn. They stage the football cleanly and rely on slow motion and swelling crowd noise to manufacture the big moments. The real problem is the script. Every obstacle arrives on schedule and resolves before it can sting. The score climbs under each setback to tell the audience how to feel, and the film never trusts a quiet scene to land on its own. The faith content stays soft and unexamined, present as mood rather than as anything the movie is willing to wrestle with.
American Underdog has a genuinely good story to tell. Kurt Warner’s path from the grocery aisle to the Hall of Fame is the kind of thing screenwriters invent and nobody believes. The film treats that material with reverence and sands off every hard surface. There is no doubt here, no real darkness, no cost that is not quickly repaid. It is a smooth and pleasant retelling of an extraordinary life that forgets extraordinary lives are built out of the parts this movie skips.