In Twenty 20-Fav, we’re spending 2025 examining the work of actor/director Jon Favreau. This week we take a look at The Replacements, a sports comedy about how scabs are good, actually.
Right away, I find the very premise of The Replacements conflicting. On the one hand, it’s about NFL players going on strike and the league hiring scabs to cross the picket line to finish the season. On paper, that frickin’ sucks. But then, on the other hand, the movie raises the completely reasonable question of whether NFL players should even be paid millions of dollars in the first place. The players are portrayed as the villains of the story because they care more about money than the game. Then again, this is also a comedy (and mild rom-com), so the movie doesn’t really dwell on either of these facts. It’s more an excuse to let a wacky cast of characters goof around and play professional football.
So the film opens with the players going on strike. Leading the strike for the Washington Sentinels is quarterback Eddie Martel (Brett Cullen), but we’ll get back to him. The team’s owner (Jack Warden in his final role) tasks one of his former coaches, Jimmy McGinty (Gene Hackman), with pulling together a team of replacement players to finish out the season.
Filling out the roster are a colorful cast of characters who all seem to have been pulled from the Major League school of wacky sports stereotypes:
- Lightning fast but tragically clumsy wide receiver Clifford Franklin (Orlando Jones)
- Welsh soccer player with a gambling problem Nigel Gruff (Rhys Ifans)
- Lunatic DC SWAT officer and linebacker Danny Bateman1 (Jon Favreau)
- Former ODB bodyguards Jamal (Faizon Love) & Andre Jackson (Michael Taliferro)
- Ordained minister and running back Walter Cochran (Troy Winbush)
- Sumo wrestler-turned-offensive tackle Jumbo Fumiko (Ace Yonamine)
- Deaf tight end Brian Murphy (David Denman)
And leading the team is former college quarterback Shane Falco (Keanu Reeves), whose complete breakdown during the 1996 Sugar Bowl follows him around and haunts him to this day. But McGinty sees greatness in Falco and wants to give him a second chance. Y’know, until the season ends. Or the strike ends. Whichever comes first, really.
So the team has the difficult task of finding its rhythm in just four games. Tensions flare up and personalities clash. Jamal and Andre can’t stop themselves from being racist pricks to Jumbo2, who’s already busy stuffing himself full of hard-boiled eggs to bulk up like he’s Cool Hand Luke or something. The offensive coach (Ernest movie mainstay Gailard Sartain) struggles with how to communicate to his deaf tight end. (Jimmy gives him one very obvious suggestion: “Learn sign language.”) Clifford wanders around acting like the class clown. And all the while, Martel and the other striking players keep showing up to give Shane a much-deserved hard time. But it’s that last bit that forces the team to coalesce around Shane, who’s not trying to prove anything to anybody. He just wants to play and not fuck things up this time. Who can’t relate to that?
There’s also a mild will-they/won’t-they romance that blooms between Shane and head cheerleader Annabelle (Brooke Langton). There’s not a whole lot of tension here. She’s cute, she runs a bar, she’s into Shane, he’s into her. They should give it a shot. And they do, in a romantic scene underscored by The Police’s “Every Breath You Take”, which I wish I could say is one of the film’s few big music cues, but there’s a whole ecosystem of weird music cues in this film that I feel like I need to address now.
The Replacements features an entire soundtrack’s worth of Real Music. Jocks Jams standards like “Good Vibrations” and “Gonna Make You Sweat”, sports movie staples such as “We Will Rock You” and “Rock and Roll Part 2”. But then there are album cuts from The Rolling Stones, a couple of cleverly used disco cuts (Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls” and Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” underscore some of the film’s better gags). Most of the music ranges from the kinds of things you’d expect to hear in a sports movie, to ironic picks that work well as a joke. Simply put, there’s a ton of licensed music in this movie. So it’s baffling when you start to hear soundalike tracks thrown into the mix, courtesy of composer John Debney and guitarist Marc Bonilla.
The following songs aren’t actually in the movie, but it sounds like they are:
- “Come Out and Play” by The Offspring
- “Walk This Way” by Aerosmith (but specifically the Run DMC version)
- “All The Small Things” by Blink 182
- “Heroes” by David Bowie, as performed by The Wallflowers
The last one is the most baffling to me. “Heroes” is a perfectly fine song to end the movie with. It fits the mood well enough. The replacement Sentinels finish the season with a win, sending the team to the playoffs just in time for the strike to end and the millionaire players to come back and completely blow it3.
So then it only makes sense to close the movie with a triumphant track like David Bowie’s “Heroes”. And the Wallflowers’ cover for the Godzilla ’98 soundtrack is a great rendition4. But apparently they couldn’t license that version for the movie? Because it’s another soundalike track, this time with a singer rasping his way through the lyrics to sound just like Jakob Dylan. It’s almost identical to the actual song, so I can only assume that one of two things happened: Either the movie ran out of licensing money, forcing Debney and Bonilla to fake their way through it; or the rights holder said no, at which point Debney and Bonilla decided to fake their way through it anyway. Whatever the case, it’s an odd way to build a soundtrack.
They actually did release a soundtrack album, by the way. There are exactly five licensed songs from the movie featured on the album. The other eleven tracks include all the incidental score and soundalike cuts featured during the football games, credited to John Debney and a band called Font 48. As far as I can tell, that’s just a band they made up for the album. The “Heroes” cover is conspicuously absent, though with that being a full song and not just filler music, I guess that makes sense. Licensing is fun, ain’t it?
It’s also worth pointing out that The Replacements is a football movie featuring a team coming together through song and dance that comes out just a month before Remember The Titans, which pulls the exact same move. Only difference is the team in The Replacements gets down to “I Will Survive”, and the only dance the team seems to know is the Electric Slide…
Alright, so setting aside all the internal politics and awkward music cues, The Replacements is still just a silly comedy about goofuses playing football. And on that front, it mostly succeeds. It helps that Keanu is trying really hard to anchor this ensemble into something resembling an actual football team. He’s a reliable straight man for this murderer’s row of idiots. It also helps to have John Madden and Pat Summerall on hand to give their brand of color commentary during the games. It lends the film that extra little touch of legitimacy, taking the sting out of the fact that no actual NFL teams allowed their likenesses to be used.
The film comes from director Howard Deutch, who got his start directing the music video for Police drummer Stewart Copeland’s “Don’t Box Me In”5, as well as Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful for John Hughes. This is one of those films that really doesn’t call for any kind of auteurish nonsense. Ya get in there, have Orlando Jones crash into a couple dudes, have Keanu put on the smolder, tell a few PG-13-ish sex jokes, and then ya get out. The Replacements is a real meat-and-potatoes film, which some might consider a bad thing. But what those people fail to realize is that sometimes meat and potatoes are all you want.
THE FAVREAU DIMENSION
Once again, Favreau gets the chance to play an intense wacko. He hinted at that kind of aggression in Persons Unknown and Very Bad Things, but here he really gets to cut loose and just body some fools. Danny Bateman is introduced in a montage where Favreau just tosses stuntmen around in a warehouse and just screaming his head off. That’s pretty much his entire character: A bull in a china shop. Ya can’t say he doesn’t wear it well…
It’s also worth pointing out that this is the first time Favreau and Faizon Love work together, though they don’t really interact in any scenes. We’re gonna see Love appear in a couple Favreau joints coming up soon.
FINAL RATING
3 stars (out of 5). S’not bad.
NEXT TIME: Speaking of which, Fav’s first spin in the director’s chair.
- Get it? Like American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman. Cuz he’s crazy.
↩︎ - In the same breath, Jamal refuses to acknowledge the difference between China and Japan, and also mimics Bruce Lee yells at him. It’s… uncomfortable, to say the least.
↩︎ - At least, I assume that’s what’ll happen. Not only did this team of rowdy misfits figure out how to work as a team, but the fans eventually start to root for them too. So sure, let’s kick ’em out and bring back the assholes who nearly ruined the season for everybody. That’ll be great for ratings, right?
↩︎ - I’d also argue that there is no bad rendition of “Heroes”, but that’s beside the point.
↩︎ - Which may explain how they managed to get “Every Breath You Take”. ↩︎
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