Booted from his team decades earlier, Mike Flynt (Michael Chiklis), gets the idea to go back to his alma mater’s football team, where he tries out, makes the roster and becomes a mentor to teammates who are younger than his own children. But Mike’s return to the game also offers a gateway for him to right his own regrets and address the kind of husband and father he was to his family.
Like an earnest comedy sketch, “The Senior,” directed by Rod Lurie, builds up to a hammy inspirational climax in which Chiklis, looking like an ebullient iteration of Anger from “Inside Out,” is hoisted onto the shoulders of his teammates, “Rudy”-style.
This kind of triumph feels ludicrous for a serious sports drama, but we’re meant to buy into the film’s unlikely premise, about a 59-year-old man from West Texas who improbably rejoins his college football team, because it’s based on a true story. But not every tale needs to be made into a movie. (Unsurprisingly, it is backed by Angel Studios, the faith-based production company from Utah that made the anti-child trafficking movie “Sound of Freedom” and offers a QR code during the end credits for the audience to “pay it forward” and buy tickets for other viewers.)
You can simply surrender yourself to the bland moral lessons of the movie, but even then, it’s hard not to feel like this was best left as a quirky human interest segment on a slow news day.
The Senior
Rated PG for thematic content, violence, language and a suggestive reference. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters.
The post ‘The Senior’ Review: Just Like Old Times appeared first on New York Times.
