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'Kicking & Screaming': Will Ferrell scores again

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

There's no crying in baseball, but apparently, there's a lot of kicking and screaming in kids' soccer.

At least, that's the impression given by "Kicking & Screaming," a mid-level Will Ferrell comedy that, while not "Elf"-brilliant, is enjoyable and often quite funny. Just watching Ferrell pull faces (for lack of a better term) is hilarious. And while he's a less agile physical actor than Jim Carrey, he makes an endearing stumblebum as he trips, falls and throws over-caffeinated tantrums.

Universal Pictures

'Kicking & Screaming'

B-

The verdict: Will Ferrell scores again, with a healthy assist from Robert Duvall and Mike Ditka.

Directors: Jesse Dylan
Starring: Will Ferrell, Robert Duvall, Kate Walsh, Mike Ditka, Musetta Vander
Run time: 96 minutes
Release date: May 13, 2005
Rating: PG for thematic elements, language and some crude humor.
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Ferrell plays Phil, a nice-guy suburban dad whose over-competitive father may as well be The Great Santini. Which, he is.

Really.

Reprising bits of the monomanical drive he brought to his role in as the title character in that 1979 film, Robert Duvall plays Phil's father, Buck, with gleeful old-pro gusto and bluster. Imagine "Apocalypse Now's" Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore coaching a kiddie soccer team and you're pretty close.

Buck has just traded his own grandson, Sam (Dylan McLaughlin), from his first-place Gladiators to the last-place Tigers. Finding a spine on behalf of his kid that he didn't have for himself, Phil stands up to his dad and volunteers to coach Sam's new team.

Heads butt. Not just on the soccer field.

This is hardly an original premise. Think "The Bad News Bears" (which returns later this summer with Billy Bob Thornton"). Think, "The Longest Yard" (which returns later this month with Adam Sandler). Heck, think of all those movies made in the last 10 years — or maybe 10 months — that have pitted the rag-tag underdogs against the Big Winning Team.

It doesn't matter. Ferrell generates oodles of good Will — er, will — whether he's discovering that one salient feature of coffee is that it's usually hot or screaming "Loser!!!" at an 11-year-old.

Duvall is always a draw, even when he's coasting a little, as he does here. The real surprise is a scene-stealing Mike Ditka (yes, that Mike Ditka) as himself. He's Buck's next-door neighbor and he will do anything to get the old man's goat. Including, agreeing to be Phil's assistant coach, thus giving Ferrell two authority figures to mess with. And mess he does, especially when, trying to assert his piecemeal authority, the star orders Ditka to get him some juice.

You don't turn Mike Ditka into a juice boy.