Home Team tells the classic story you see all the time. Coach leads his team to a Super Bowl victory only to find himself suspended three years later for his role in the Bountygate Scandal, so the coach returns home to coach his son’s youth football team, earning redemption (kind of), and (re)learning that football and life are not all about winning.
Okay, so maybe it’s not so much a “classic” story so much as a weird one to selectively adapt. The Bountygate Scandal was massive – and I’m not just saying that as a long-suffering Vikings fan (we blew that NFC Championship game just fine on our own), so to see how it was handled here felt super weird.
Home Team starts with the New Orleans Saints, led by coach Sean Payton (Kevin James) winning the 2010 Super Bowl, followed by quick shot of Payton being suspended for his role in the bounty scandal. The movie never takes a hard line on Payton’s level of involvement, brushing it aside with the ol’ “I’m the coach, so I’m responsible” line.
The scandal really only serves as the reason for Payton to go back home to Texas to reconnect with his son, because apparently he’s some trash absentee father? Seems like quite the odd choice for a movie that had Payton’s direct involvement. What’s even weirder, is that there were a couple ways to make this a legitimately good movie. One, go all in on the Bountygate of it all, make it a Moneyball-like drama. They maybe wouldn’t have gotten Payton or the NFL’s involvement, but they could have found a workaround.
Or two, leave the Bountygate out of it. Make the coach – doesn’t necessarily have to specifically be Payton in this case – leave the NFL for another reason. Payton going back to coach his son’s team is a really cool story…if it wasn’t set against the backdrop of him being suspended for a dirty, dangerous scheme perpetrated by his team. But here? It’s this weird middle ground where they try to do both, while also avoiding both. Pretty much nothing works in Home Team, but everyone was fighting an uphill battle from the start with the uneven story direction.
I’m going to change things up a bit for the rest of this review. Home Team sucks, plain and simple. It’s lazy, unfunny, uninspired. So I’m going to piggyback off that – well, the lazy part, at least – and just list out some of the general thoughts I have about it.
- It’s a Happy Madison production, not starring Adam Sandler, so I suppose we should have known better than to expect this to be anything above trash
- I know that it’s Texas, but it’s still 6th grade football; the using announcers at games to explain the game gimmick doesn’t work
- The team sucks in the movie, but in real life was actually pretty good, only losing two games all season
- Taylor Lautner appeared in in 6 episodes of a TV show called Cuckoo in 2018, and nothing else since 2016, and decided *this* was the choice for his big comeback?
- The Warriors’ assistant coach was just there as comedic relief, but was made an alcoholic? Absolutely wild choice that makes no sense for what is otherwise broadly a kids movie
- Does Sean Payton hate his ex-wife’s new husband? Rob Schneider (cool, Rob Schneider…) plays him as weird, hippie loser who it certainly feels like the audience is not supposed to respect
- There’s what has to be a full 5 minute scene devoted to kids vomiting
- There are three (three!) instances of fun.’s “We Are Young”, taking up a good 10 minutes of the runtime
- Sean Payton has an absurd cameo where his character takes a petty cheap shot at the Saints
This movie blows.
Score: 22/100
