Gridiron Gang (2006) Critic Reviews
Metascore®:
Based upon 9 Critic ReviewsHighest Rated
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- Favorite Critics
The movie's inevitabilities (the humiliating loss, the ebb and flow of camaraderie, the triumphant finale) have deep resonance.Read the full review
Gridiron Gang gives you a lot more to think about during the ride home.Read the full review
A crowd-pleasing, uplifting, feel-good and not-so-rare hybrid -- the sports/prison movie -- in which Los Angeles gangbangers are taught the virtues of trading violence on the streets for violence on the field.Read the full review
None of their stories are particularly resonant, but the film is really about a grand social experiment gone right, and it succeeds well enough on that front, even while it isn't that convincing in the particulars.Read the full review
The best thing about Gridiron Gang is the performance of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. He is engaging, affable and wholly believable as a former football star turned officer in a juvenile detention center.Read the full review
Instead of a crackling good movie in which "The Longest Yard" meets, say, "The Bad News Bears," director Phil Joanou instead decided to make Gridiron Gang a lugubrious tutorial on the importance of being a winner.Read the full review
Great material, but the film never catches fire.Read the full review
Parades itself as an ''honest'' message movie, a call for troubled kids to choose life over street nihilism, but the picture is so earnest that it leaves out the easy, old-school pleasure conjured by the last few years of Disney sports flicks (Invincible, Miracle, The Rookie).Read the full review
The movie's good intentions are consistently undermined by its simplistic notion of redemption, and its inspirational thrust is diluted by an epilogue that suggests the program still has a ways to go in the life-altering department.Read the full review
