Leatherheads takes place in 1925, during the early years of professional football, when the crowds are sparse and the teams hover on bankruptcy.  The Duluth Bulldogs are one of those teams and Dodge Connelly, star of the team, finds himself and his teammates without a way to spend their Sunday afternoons. He hears a radio broadcast about a college game which drew 40,000 people to watch World War 1 hero turned college boy football hero Carter "The Bullet" Rutherford (John Krasinski from The Office and License to Wed) he has an idea - why not get him to play professionally? Using  Danny Ocean-like twists, Connelly makes this happen.  But there has to be a dramatic twist so enter Renee Zellweger as Lexie Littleton - crack reporter for the Chicago Tribune who has a lead that Rutherford's war hero story lacks truth. She is sent by her editor to check out the story and interview Rutherford. NOW our romantic triangle is complete as she finds herself equally attracted to Rutherford and Connelly (shades of Bull Durham).

The witty repartee aside, Leatherheads was good, not great. As a football movie it lags far behind any of my favorites. As a romantic comedy, it was pretty obvious who Littleton was going to end up with from the very beginning. As a physical comedy there were lots of flashes of borrowed past comedy brilliance.  

So why didn't I like this film more? I have one large problem with the plot (this is not a giveaway):  World War 1 ended in June of 1919, and this film is happening 6 years later. We are still seeing Rutherford's army unit in uniform and still all together.  Rutherford is in his late 20's, and still in college. Let's say, using the best possible scenario for this film, that he got drafted into the army and sent overseas to fight in WWI at the age of 17 in 1919. This would be before he went to college. He has his act of heroism and the war ends when he is still possibly 17. Fast forward to 1925 and he is now in his 3rd year of college (they say at the beginning he has one year to go). That would mean he did nothing from 1920 to 1922? This three year gap is a problem. Oh, and they seemed to reference that this took place during the Battle of the Ardennes. That was in August, 1914. Before the Americans were involved.

But Clooney is still one of the most watchable actors around. Don't miss this one on cable.

Hank Yuloff is a founder of Film Monthly and film critic in Los Angeles..