Sports Illustrated - USA (2022-02)

FEBRUARY 2022 29

Focus desperately wants to be a contemporary, his-and-

hers version of The Sting, but it just sort of sits there,

unable to spark to life. (It needed either a different pair

of stars or a defibrillator.) Still, one scene that does work

involves an intricate swindle at Super Bowl XVII, pitting

the “Rhinos” against the “Thrashers.” Since it’s become

harder and harder to get the litigiously overprotective

NFL to sign off on using the league’s actual teams and

uniforms in movies (see the ridiculous jerseys and color

combinations in Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday), the

players on the field look like they’re a part of some XFL

smackdown. Still, the con is a honey, as Smith bets a

deep-pocketed gambler (B.D. Wong) $2 million that

he can tell him the uniform number of the player he’s

thinking of. Naturally, he guesses right.

More up-to-the-minute is American Underdog (2021),

an inspirational story based on the unlikely career arc

of Kurt Warner. The film traces all of the stations of the

cross in Warner’s rise from supermarket checkout clerk

to starting quarterback of the St. Louis Rams to the MVP

of Super Bowl XXXIV. But despite Warner’s helming the

Greatest Show on Turf to a 23–16 win over the Titans that

was decided on the last play, the action sequences from

the game are perfunctory, proving that while Hollywood

knows how to tell a story about characters—Shazam’s

Zachary Levi does Warner justice in the starring role—it

tends to whiff on Super Bowl reenactments.

Finally, and sticking with the Rams (although this

time during their original tenure in L.A.), there’s the most

famous—and most decorated—Hollywood movie to orbit

around the Super Bowl: Warren Beatty’s 1978 Best Picture

nominee, Heaven Can Wait. A loose update of 1941’s

Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Beatty stars as Joe Pendleton—a

QB for the blue-and-yellow who’s prematurely taken to

heaven by an overzealous angel (Buck Henry). Realizing

his error, the angel places Pendleton in the body of a mil-

lionaire industrialist who has just been murdered by his

wife. In his new corporeal form, Joe, still hungry for a

Super Bowl win, decides to buy the Rams and lead them

to a championship—which he accomplishes, of course, in

the climactic third act, with a victory over the Steelers. Not

everyone would call Heaven Can Wait a Super Bowl movie,

or really even a football movie. But it would turn out to be

eerily prescient: The Rams actually did meet the Steelers in

are sandwiched together in the film, but the most interest-
ing one chronicles Thompson’s trip to cover Super Bowl VI.
Of course, he never sets foot inside the stadium to witness
Staubach’s MVP performance in the Cowboys’ 24–3 rout
of the Dolphins. Instead he’s persuaded by his equally
unhinged law yer (Peter Boyle) to join a band of freedom
fighters to smuggle weapons to Latin America.
A more recent movie only slightly more concerned
with what happens on the gridiron is the 2015 con-man
caper comedy Focus. Will Smith and Margot Robbie (no
relation to Joe) share whatever the opposite of chemistry
is as a couple of grifters who crisscross the globe trying
to separate obnoxiously rich suckers from their money.

DURING ONE TENSE SEQUENCE, AS DERN AND HIS

WOULD-BE DEADLY BLIMP

NOSEDIVE INTO THE ROARING STADIUM, WE GET

A NICE, EXTENDED GLIMPSE OF TERRY BRADSHAW

THROWING A TOUCHDOWN TO LYNN SWANN.