That statement would be true for any two movies I watched to start 2022, as long as James was in one of them. But he's specifically not in one of them, as you will see.
Along with his buddy Adam Sandler, James elected not to come back for the fourth installment of the Hotel Transylvania franchise, Transformania, which kicked off my 2022 movie year last weekend and also became the first 2022 movie I reviewed. I guess he and Sandler were tired of that shit and thought they could do better.
Well, the early returns suggest otherwise.
James is the star of the new Netflix movie Home Team, which is now the second 2022 movie I've reviewed. It's a Happy Madison production, so I guess if James was specifically "not in" one of my first two movies in 2022, Sandler was "not in" both of them. (I could have also told you that the titles of both of my first two 2022 movies started with "Ho." Oh wait, I just did.)
The film makes the extremely bizarre decision to take the real-life story of former New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton, who was suspended for a year for participating in a program where players on his team were paid for making hits that injured opposing players, and turn it into a feel-good inspirational sports movie.
It's not ineptly made, but it is very ineptly conceived, which is why I gave it only 3/10 on ReelGood rather than the 4/10 it might deserve.
Very likely because of the cooperation of the NFL and of Payton himself -- who has a really groan-inducing cameo near the end of the movie -- the film basically doesn't address the issue of his role in so-called Bountygate. It has to mention it -- we need to know why Payton was suspended -- but it's much more interested in Payton's apparent growth as a person by coaching his 12-year-old's football team, reconnecting with his son, and learning that bad players need to get into the game even in the championship game. (Oops, spoiler alert.)
As you will see if you read that review, there's a single scene where his son asks him about the allegations against him, and Payton's response is "It's complicated."
Really? That's it?
The embarrassing extent to which the film shirks its responsibility is a real detractor from any of the things it might do well. The receiving of concussions by football players at all levels has been a topic of discussion particularly in the last decade -- Will Smith even made a movie about it (Concussion). That a coach would preside over a locker room in which players were paid bounties for intentionally trying to injure -- and potentially concuss or paralyze -- opposing players is the type of thing that severely complicates any attempt to allow him redemption as a movie character. The makers of Home Team seemed to know this, which is why they were so loath to get into it in any detail.
The detail, according to a recap on Wikipedia, is that Payton may not have known about the bounty program at the time it was happening -- it was orchestrated by the team's defensive coordinator -- but he certainly did try to cover it up after the fact. It seems very unlikely that he would not have known about it, and if he didn't, it delivers a different sort of indictment of his being out of touch with his own team. The most we get out of the character in the film is an admission that the buck stops with him and that he needs to take responsibility. "Then why are you appealing your suspension?" his son asks. "Another good question," Payton responds.
Whatever the truth of the situation, the reality is that Home Team handles it lamely and lets Payton off the hook morally. Oh, his character needs to grow like any movie character, but his area of supposed growth is the considerably less fraught lesson that it's more important to play all the players on your team than to win at all costs. Yawn.
So this is the apparent "good work" James wanted to do instead of making another pretty entertaining installment of a durable children's movie franchise.
(By the way, that "good work" includes typical Happy Madison shenanigans like the whole team getting food poisoning and vomiting on their opponents during the final drive of an important game. The food poisoning is a result of these homemade energy bars given the team by the new agey dipstick played by Sandler crony Rob Schneider, who plays the new husband of Payton's ex-wife -- another Sandler crony, his own wife, Jackie Sandler. There are like three other Sandlers in this movie. You get the idea.)
Hotel Transylvania: Transformania is no classic, but it's definitely good enough to have been worth making -- and the actors hired to voice the roles previously voiced by Sandler and James are good enough that we don't miss them at all.
According to my 6/10 rating on ReelGood, it's twice as good as Home Team, in any case.
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