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Kicking & Screaming (2005) More at IMDbPro »

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115 comments in total

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36 out of 49 people found the following comment useful :-
The Bad News Bears does soccer. Again., 14 May 2005

Author: imken24 from United States

It's been done many, many times. The rag-tag bunch of nobodies has to square off against the unstoppable professionals of the best local youth team. It is a great story, but it has been done to death. If you're a fan of Will Ferrel, you will like this movie. He is very funny in it. The movie also tells the story of the relationship between father and son with both comedy and touching moments sprinkled in. Robert Duvall gives his usual great performance. Mike Ditka gives a pretty funny performance as himself. He played exactly what his image is. If you go to this movie expecting to laugh, you will feel it is worth it. If you go expecting a great movie, see something else.

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17 out of 23 people found the following comment useful :-
A formulaic cliché, true. But also a colourful, honest, and straightforward entertainment. I liked it., 31 July 2005

Author: bopdog from Cardiff, Wales

I liked this movie. Sometimes a 'simple' movie can be colourful enough, and entertaining enough, without having to be great or artsy. 'Kicking and Screaming' was very formulaic. I actually found myself predicting each step and outcome as the plot unfolded--- the adult abused child, his dad, and his son, and the three generations colliding. The re-play of the overbearing father thing, the adult man vowing to never be like his father, but then getting accidentally caught up in the same dynamic himself. then the sports movie redemption, etc., etc.

It sounds like a cliché, and it is--- but, oddly, I found myself more surprised than annoyed as each cliché denouement surfaced. I kept thinking, as the cliché loomed--- 'Nahhhh... they wouldn't do that. There must be some slick tricky twist coming up.' Nope. No twists, no tricks--- all the clichés play through exactly like you expected them to. But there was a certain courage and honesty about that, which I greatly admired. They had a simple, straight-forward, no-nonsense formula story, which they played out exactly as that. It was very honest.

Robert Duvall--- always great. Will Ferrell, always funny. Mike Ditka, as an actor--- he's a great football coach.

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14 out of 19 people found the following comment useful :-
Ferrell comes back to comedy, 9 May 2005
Author: Greg Eichelberger from San Diego

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Will Ferrell has had a pretty decent film career after leaving Saturday Night Live – much better than some of his contemporaries. His first effort, "Old School," was hilarious and was followed up by "Elf," which was even funnier. Later, he made "Anchorman" and most recently had the best role in Woody Allen's uneven "Melinda & Melinda." Now it's back to family comedy with the tale of a frustrated, milktoast father, Phil Weston (Ferrell), the owner of a vitamin store, who decides to coach a soccer team so his son can get in some playing time. Ironically, his son, Sam, was dumped from his grandfather Buck's (Robert Duval) squad, the champion Gladiators. Utilizing his father's worst enemy (and neighbor), former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka as his assistant, as well as two extremely talented Italian players (Francesco Liotti and Alessandro Ruggiero), Phil's Tigers go on a "Bad News Bears"-type winning streak. Of course, this is a family film, so when the gentle Phil goes crazy with the intense competition (and his new found addiction to coffee), he has to humble himself before his team – and his son – and finally do the right thing when the Tigers meet the Gladiator's for the title. Ferrell excels playing the goofy, sensitive man-child, who finds himself becoming like his father, a sporting goods mogul. Sure, there are the typical over-the-top SNL-like pratfalls (he gets stomped by Buck in a violent tether ball game, beaten up by a group of kids, spills scalding hot coffee on himself, etc.), but the message is sweet, the children cute and the 90 minutes, for the most part, very entertaining.

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9 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :-
Coach On Coffee, 11 October 2008
Author: Senyales from Fraggle Rock

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

'Kicking & Screaming' is pretty much a typical football comedy about an underdog team that wins in the end. Nothing new here but the reason why I watched it and enjoyed it was because of the cast. Will Ferrell is fun to watch and a laidback Robert Duvall gives a funny relaxed performance as the jerk dad with a comic touch. The beautiful Kate Walsh plays the typical wife and mom and is pretty much there for star value and eye candy. I also enjoyed the scenes with the kids. The Byong Sun character was particularly funny. The film does occasionally derail as Ferrell's Phil gets hooked on coffee and turns into a maniac coach but then again, it made me laugh. Overall this isn't exactly a great film and it has nothing new to offer but it's good time pass as it draws some laughter. Perhaps that was director Jesse Dylan's intention.

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13 out of 18 people found the following comment useful :-
Decent, but not Anchorman or Elf, 9 May 2006

Author: FordPrefect-42 from behind you.

Kicking and Screaming was decent. Will Ferrel plays the son of a dad who WILL NOT lose to ANYONE (Robert Duvall). He takes over coaching his son's Little League soccer team and goes nuts trying to win at all costs.

Kicking & Screaming seemed like it wanted to be the Anchorman of kid's movies, but it just lost me. There were some really funny parts, one involving the team needing to help out at the Italian kids family butcher shop, but overall, it just tried to hard to be a quirky movie that adults and kids would enjoy.

All in all, not Will Ferrel's best movie, but definitely not horrible. A good saterday night rental.

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6 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :-
Almost a complete Bad News Bears ripoff., 29 May 2006

Author: nuclearsnow from United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

If you rent and watch the Bad News Bears then watch this movie it will pretty obvious the movie copied it almost completely. Several key points in both movies..

1.In Bad News Bears a ex washed up baseball player coaches a very bad little league baseball team, in Kicking and Screaming Will Farrel plays a man who wasn't good at sports much to the letdown of his father decides to take over a junior soccer team.

2.In Bad News Bears Buttermaker lets the team play as they want till he see's how bad they are and decides to recruit some good players to help them win, Phil a nice guy lets them play as they can, seeing how disappointed his son is in not winning, lets Mike Dikta talk him into recruiting two good soccer playing Italian kids so they can win.

3.Buttermaker starts to get very competitive and instead of letting everyone have fun and play, gives his two ringers most of the playtime and the other kids get left out, Phil makes a bet with his dad, gets very competitive and puts everything on his two ringers and the other kids get left out.

4.Buttermaker see's the error of his ways benches his two ringers and lets the kids play,Phil see's the error of his ways and benches his two ringers and lets the other kids play.

Basically take out baseball in the Bad News Bears, insert soccer and make a few changes and you have Kicking and Screaming, most movies and TV shows copy each other in Hollywood, shame when they do it as blatantly as Kicking and Screaming does, watch the original Bad News Bears a much better movie.

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9 out of 13 people found the following comment useful :-
If You're a Member of a Soccer Family, You'll Love It, 22 November 2005

Author: gmihran from Silicon Valley, United States

If you're a parent with kids in AYSO soccer, or a kid that plays(ed) the game, then you'll love this mindless, uplifting comedy about a coach going to the extreme to help his Tigers soccer team win. If you expect nothing more than that, then you'll enjoy yourself and have fun with this movie. The kids' soccer play has some real tricks, many of which our own kids tried during the next Saturday game! Kudos especially to Robert Duvall and Mike Ditka who really played their parts well and added a lot of variety to the movie so that it is not completely saturated with Will Ferrell (who also balanced his father/son roles well). A great family flick enjoyed by all, even the grandparents :)

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14 out of 24 people found the following comment useful :-
Mediocre Family Film, 30 May 2005

Author: christian123

After years of dealing with his father's insanely competitive nature, Phil Weston (Will Ferrell) finally gets the chance to meet up to his father's lofty expectations. He starts coaching a kids' soccer team, but as they get closer to the championships, he finds himself turning into his manic father.

The premise isn't exactly new and a movie like this one tends to be on the predictable side. However, sport comedies can be enjoyable and fun so I was expecting a fun little movie from Kicking and Screaming. The film turned out to be mediocre though. It offered a few funny moments but the script is kind of weak and Ferrell isn't given a lot to work with. Screenwriters Leo Benvenuti and Steve Rudnick offer a rather lame script filled with a bunch of clichés and it brings the film down. They seem to be stealing from the Bad News Bears and Little Giants. However, Kicking and Screaming still has a few original ideas and it is a harmless movie.

The acting is okay, nothing special. Will Ferrell gives an okay performance as Phil. Sometimes he manages to be really funny while other times he tries way too hard. Surprisingly, Mike Ditka steals the film from Ferrell and he gives a good performance. His performance isn't going to light the world on fire but at least he does a better job than Duvall. Robert Duvall gives a bad and dull performance as Phil's dad. Comedy is not his element and he should avoid doing it in the future. The funniest kid in the film is Elliot Cho who played Byong Sun. The most annoying kid in the film is Steven Anthony Lawrence since he isn't funny at all. I don't understand what casting directors see in him since he's just annoying and not funny.

Jess Dylan directs and he does an okay job. He manages to come up with a few funny scenes and he keeps the film very simple and safe. While the movie did have it's funny moments, it also had a few dull scenes that weren't all that necessary. The movie is also kind of bland and really predictable. It was also kind of a lazy movie since the filmmakers didn't really try anything new. The good thing is that the movie is only 95 minutes long so at least it wasn't too much of a pain to sit through. Still, Kicking and Screaming is only a mediocre family film and it's kind of a one joke comedy that gets old after awhile. In the end, Kicking and Screaming isn't worth the full ticket price but it might make for a decent rental. Rating 6/10

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31 out of 58 people found the following comment useful :-
Will Ferrell's Attempt to Save a Crummy Cheeseball Movie, 13 May 2005

Author: Michael Margetis (pmargetis@cox.net) from United States

Out of all the talented people who were on 'Saturday Night Live' in the last fifteen years, Will Ferrell is by far my favorite. He's such a charismatic, energetic and hilarious performer. He truly is a comic genius. He's also one of the most successful SNL alumni of all time. For most of the cast members, after they leave 'Saturday Night Live' their careers go down the toilets. But not Will Ferrell, he only improved his career after his goodbye to SNL, with great comedies like Old School, Anchorman, and even, Elf. Whenever you go see a Will Ferrell film you have the strong expectation of it being really good. Well, Ferell's latest effort, 'Kicking and Screaming', is a disappointment of epic proportions. But that isn't his fault. Poor Mr. Ferrell tries as hard as he can to lift this dud off the ground, but he just isn't able to because of the movie's beyond lame screenplay. Yes, those thinking 'Kicking and Screaming', would be the next great Will Ferrell movie are sadly mistaking. I was one of those people, and that's why I left the theater so incredibly disappointed.

The movie is a little league soccer flick, and it circles around the all-too-familiar plot of the dipstick son trying to live up to his non-supportive father. The dipstick is Will Ferrell's character, Phil Weston. He owns a vitamin store, and is always trying to gain the respect of his father, Buck Weston (played by Academy Award Winner Robert Duvall), who owns a chain of sporting good stores and viciously coaches a little league soccer team, which Phil's son is a part of. One day, Buck trades Phil's son to another team because he isn't a good player. This infuriates Phil, and eventually has him coach the team his son has been traded to, to show daddy he's not a screw-up. The movie pretty much follows the competition of the two father-son coaches. Whose team will win the championship? By the end of the movie, you really don't care anymore, and you're looking at your watch frantically to see how much of this waste of film is left.

It isn't so much 'Kicking and Screaming' is a horrible movie, it's just not a good one by any stretch of the imagination. The biggest problem with the film is the screenplay -- it is absolutely dreadful (to quote Simon Cowell to one of the untalented hack wannabe singers on 'American Idol'). It's very amateurish, and it doesn't go places it should to be funny. It's very bland and so conventional it will have you yawning after the 30-minute mark. Although it succeeds being funny sometimes, for the most part it fails miserably at earning laughs. Whoever wrote this trashy script should be banned from the film industry, because it is just awful. The movie is really saved by Will Ferrell, who really puts forth an effort to make the most of his part, but an actor in a film is only as good as the film's screenplay. Ferrell achieves hilarity in some scenes, but most of his lines are embarrassingly stupid and unoriginal. Mike Ditka is actually pretty good playing himself, and Robert Duvall serves as an example of a waste of good talent in this childish sap fest.

In conclusion, 'Kicking and Screaming' is something you should avoid. If you really love Will Ferrell, it just may be worth watching to see Ferrell break out in a violent rage brought on by too much coffee, but for the lot of us it is just plain old cinematic crap. Grade: C- (screened at AMC Deer Valley 30, Phoenix, Arizona, 5/13/05)

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32 out of 61 people found the following comment useful :-
Finally, a non-Pixar family movie that adults can enjoy, 12 May 2005

Author: (johnny_betts@hotmail.com) from http://www.themoviemark.com

You may be surprised to learn that rather than just being another overly silly Will Ferrell movie, Kicking & Screaming is actually a brilliantly poignant exposé on the foibles of the human condition. While a movie like Crash chooses to tackle the heavy issue of human relationships within a racially diverse atmosphere, Kicking & Screaming goes a different direction and touches the soul of two topics that are near and dear to my heart: sports competition and coffee addiction.

I don't know about you girly girls, but all us manly men are well-rehearsed in sports competitiveness. If you're worth your "man weight" in gold, then you're driven by the need to compete. This isn't something that you carry through high school and then grow out of, oh no, you're stuck with it for life. I may have been at my most intense when running over a catcher back when I played high school baseball, but I'm still known to throw an elbow in the church basketball league and to do a little trash talking during a heated ping pong match. If you refuse to believe a ping pong match can get heated, then you've never played it the right way.

Anyway, this is a movie whose humor feeds heavily off the fuel provided by the competitiveness of all the men involved. Whether it be Robert Duvall (a real man who says the only daily vitamin he needs is a steak) going toe-to-toe against Will Ferrell in a passionate game of tether ball or Duvall and Mike Ditka constantly trying to outdo each other or Will Ferrell becoming so addicted to coffee that he installs a cappuccino machine on the bench and forces Ditka to resign as assistant coach, the chemistry just works.

It's a chemistry that is hard to accurately depict in writing. A chemistry whose effectiveness lies in the delivery. For example, there's a young Asian boy on the soccer team named "Byong Sun." When his mother asks Ditka for an autograph, Ditka asks how to spell his name. She starts to spell it, but he stops her and says, "I think I got it." When she later looks at the autograph she sees that Ditka has written, "Bing Bong." I can't explain why, but this had me cracking up for about 5 minutes. I'd try to concentrate on the movie, then I'd think about how self-assured Ditka was that he now knew how to spell the name, and I'd bust out laughing all over again. Then later in the movie when Ditka yells out, "Way to go, Bing Bong!" I lost it all over again. It's just one of those things.

Or when Ditka tells the kids, "I eat quitters for breakfast and spit out their bones," and then Ferrell deadpans, "Delicious." My words can't do it justice. It's all in the timing and delivery. Sometimes this type of humor is so subtle that it might not be fully appreciated, so I'm warning you now to pay attention to it.

Speaking of Ditka, he steals the show. He has a natural talent for comedy like this, and it's hard not to laugh when he's on screen wearing a Bears sweater vest or a shirt that has "Ditka" on it. Just sit back and enjoy his competitive bickering with Duvall. When Duvall starts to taunt Ditka because he's been reduced to coaching little league soccer, Ditka responds by holding his hand out and saying, "I couldn't hear ya; my Super Bowl ring was making too much noise." The self-referential tone works perfectly.

The kids can get a little too cutesy at times, which will play well with soccer moms, but they do have some genuinely funny moments. Steven Anthony Lawrence is pretty annoying (intentionally so), but I did a spit take (well, not literally) when the camera focused on his face while he was running and he breathlessly stated, "I'm in bad shape for 11." I guess you had to be there.

I'm giving the movie 4 marks, and I realize that's fairly high, but this *is* a family movie, and as such it's one of the most entertaining family movies I've seen in a while. Sure, I didn't care for some of the cutesy kid stuff, and things *do* get predictable and silly, but what are negative elements for me will be looked upon more favorably by younger audiences and sappy parents.

To find a movie that will keep adults consistently laughing throughout without resorting to material that'd make you squirm if you're sitting next to mama or the kids, you usually have to look for the Pixar label, so I tip my hat to Kicking & Screaming for succeeding. This is the kind of "kid's movie" I want to take my 10-year-old brother to, not Racing Stripes.

Oh, and please do yourself a favor and try not to take the movie too seriously. If you're such a curmudgeon that you'd actually complain about the scene where a mother stops her son during a game to put sunscreen on his face, and you actually question why she didn't do this BEFORE the game then I'm sorry, but you deserve to be slapped. Let me explain something... *ahem* IT'S A MOVIE!! Still not clear? OK, let me elaborate...

IT'S A WILL FERRELL MOVIE!! Do you see "directed by Clint Eastwood" attached to the credits? No? Then remove the corn cob, loosen up, and enjoy life a little.

Sheesh. Some people. Now who wants to go head-to-head with the Betts-meister in a friendly game of ping pong?

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