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50Jessica Biel all but steals the show as Stacie.
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50A sloppy, poorly focused comedy.
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0Just stay away. It's awful.
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50As a movie, it's not much. But it's the best showcase for his charm that Butler has ever had.
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40Perhaps, if this movie fails, studios will finally accept that we all deserve better. Biel knows it already, and Butler keeps up in their scenes together.
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38The shenanigans of randy soccer moms and their obnoxious blowhard husbands are intended as comic relief. But the sappy plot of this formulaic romantic comedy is just as silly as its inane attempts at farce.
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38This isn't a genre-less character study, it's myopic romantic comedy, and watching a woman of Catherine Zeta-Jones's easy carnality and fathomless beauty compete for the attention of Gerard Butler, who's pining for Jessica Biel, is dismaying, like spotting Anna Wintour in line at a soup kitchen.
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25There isn't a moment in the entire picture in which you will recognize an element of your own life.
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16The film is a bedroom farce without the farce, a fish-out-of-water comedy on sun-cracked lake-bed, a story of fatherly redemption that barely gets past the hair-mussing stage.
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40Sometimes the movie swerves toward farce, sometimes into the zone of smiley family comedy and at other times into full-on weepiness. None of it is especially credible or engaging.
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38Only Biel and Greer lift it above the level of bleh.
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38This saga of a former soccer star coaching his son's team in order to worm his way back into the heart of his ex-wife aims to be warm and funny. Alas, it is mechanical and exhausting, like a windup toy of a monkey crashing together cymbals for 106 minutes while incrementally winding down.
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50Though the script takes pains to paint George as a passive boy-man, there's just not enough lovable here and too much of the thoughtless lout. Butler beware: In acting as in soccer, if you keep taking dives, sooner or later you pay the penalty.
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12One of those movies that comes "straight from the heart" - the heart of the hack screenwriter's manual that pushes formulaic structure to cover up a lack of compelling characters, genuine emotion or actual humor.
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25A dreary, dismally unfunny excuse for a romantic comedy.
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30Simply put, it's a mess.
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40A modestly affecting reconciliation drama wrapped in a so-so sports movie by way of a misogynistic romantic comedy, Playing for Keeps can't stop tripping all over itself.
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50At some point you hope the actor (Butler) will find a movie that will give him the right material to make hearts truly beat faster. Until then, it appears we'll have to settle for films with more flaws than his characters.
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30Yet it's not entirely forgettable. I'll long be haunted by Dennis Quaid's manic performance as a palm-greasing dad who seems to be under the influence of bath salts-tweaked-out acting that matches the camera movements.
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30Style can be a risky thing in a movie like this, which aspires above all to inoffensiveness. Originally titled "Playing the Field," which was deemed too racy, this rom-com would have been more aptly renamed "Running Out the Clock."
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40This is a good premise for a comedy, but somewhere along the way, it got diluted and turned into a sappy, feel-good story of family togetherness.
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Jan 11, 201320Playing For Keeps is awful – and not in a hilarious Ed Wood way.
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Dec 11, 201220Husbands and fathers, do not try this sh-- at home. Such "lovable" misbehavior is best left to the professional cads.
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Dec 7, 201242The central question of the movie becomes: Can George triumph over his inability to stop hot women from throwing themselves at him?
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Dec 5, 201240Watching this all-too-predictable romantic comedy/drama, my overwhelming thought was this: Given all the great filmmakers and film projects that can't find funding, how did this effort secure its reported $35 million for production?
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Dec 5, 201212Gabriele Muccino's film is knee-deep in "don't hate the player, hate the game" territory.
User score distribution:
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Mixed: 0 out of 6
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Negative: 5 out of 6
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Image This reviewer is a sucker for romantic comedies and even more of a pushover for