Review: Kicking & Screaming

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Jesse Dylan’s Kicking & Screaming, on the other hand, uses its best assets correctly and the result is a fairly good movie, despite having a fairly uncreative script. Will Ferrell stars as Phil Weston, the uncompetitive son of his intimidating father, Buck (Robert Duvall), who strictly coaches a youth soccer team. In fact, he’s so competitive that he trades his grandson to the worst squad in the entire league, The Tigers. Because of this, Phil is understandably enraged, and when the Tigers’ coach bails on the team, he decides to step up. And while everything starts as fun and games, Phil, like his father, becomes madly enraptured in the idea of winning.

For most of Kicking & Screaming’s duration, Will Ferrell and Robert Duvall are able to carry the otherwise blasé material. They have great comedic chemistry together, making a likable and all-too-realistic father/son team. The fact that they were able to make some of the lines in the movie, which were penned by Leo Benvenuti and Steve Rudnick, sound so much wittier than they actually were on paper, is a testament to their abilities as actors. This is not to say that they aren’t helped in doing so; most of the child-stars in the movie are very good, as well. Elliot Cho, the Jonathan Lipniki of Asian kids, deserves special mention for his work as Byong Sun, the adorable adoptee of two clueless lesbian mothers.

It’s when Kicking & Screaming becomes overly caught up in its story that it becomes a chore to watch. The sort of adlibbed, random feeling of the inspired sketches in the film is what works most about it; the screenwriters’ push to institute anything akin to an actual narrative was an outright mistake on their parts. All that a conventional story does for this type of movie is muddle it up with predictability and uninteresting excess. Kicking & Screaming would’ve been better off without any plot than it is with its overly derivative one. Still, I can forgive it for its clichés, just because of director Dylan’s enjoyably easy-going approach and the mere fact that Ferrell and Duvall made me laugh.