Stream It Or Skip It: ‘American Underdog’ on Hulu, an Earnestly Inspirational Bio of God-Fearing Football Hero Kurt Warner

Now on Hulu, American Underdog tells the story of Kurt Warner, Super Bowl-winning quarterback and paragon of Christian virtue. Those of us who’ve followed the NFL for the last couple decades know the major points of his life story: Undrafted, stocked shelves at a grocery store, played arena football for a while, signed by the St. Louis Rams, became unlikely Super Bowl MVP, now a Hall-of-Famer. Also, he’s really really into Jesus, which explains why Andrew and Jon Erwin, the brothers behind a bevy of faith-based movies, directed the movie about him, which hopefully is the last-ever movie titled American (fill-in-the-blank), because they’re all starting to run together, aren’t they?

AMERICAN UNDERDOG: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It’s the ’80s. Young Kurt Warner (Beau Hart) watches Joe Montana and other NFL quarterback greats hang in the pocket and deliver “the perfect throw” milliseconds before they get smeared. He’s so obsessed with watching these gridiron heroes, he’s depriving his brother of the TV so he can play the Atari, and who can blame him? Combat was STUPENDOUS. Jump ahead to 1992: Adult Kurt (Zachary Levi) is a senior at Northern Iowa University, where he’s been a benchwarmer for five years, and it looks like even longer than that, because he’s being played by a guy who’s 40. Although he finally convinces the coach to let him be the starting quarterback, and he plays really well, his hope that he’ll be drafted by an NFL team is still a delusion – no-name guy, small school – but he nevertheless clings to it.

Meanwhile, he and a pal go to the local watering hole where cheap beer is drunk and line dances are danced. One of the dancers is Brenda (Anna Paquin), a hard-to-get, self-assured, ex-Marine and divorced single mom who Kurt manages to pinch in the nutcracker. It helps that her disabled son Zack (Hayden Zaller) instantly takes a shine to Kurt, because he’s a big sweetheart of a guy. Soon enough, he moves in with Brenda and her kids and parents. He’s passed over in the draft and lasts one day on the practice field with the Green Bay Packers, after which he does… stuff? Vague stuff, some of which involves really hoping he gets to play football. After Brenda’s parents move away and he commits to supporting her and the kids, he starts making ends almost meet by stocking shelves at the local supermarket, where he stares longingly at Dan Marino on a box of Wheaties and then goes somewhere, who knows where, and chucks footballs into brick walls, which is I guess a way to stay in shape.

Then one day, the owner-coach of the Iowa Barnstormers stalks Kurt to a diner, where he’s about to pound three burgers and some onion rings – yes, I noticed, I pay attention to such things. Three burgers! Hungry boy! Anyway, the guy courts Kurt to the Arena Football League, where eight players a side smashed each other into padded walls surrounding a 50-yard field. Kurt wings TD pass after TD pass, earning $100 bills for each one, but it’s tough on his relationship with Brenda, because he’s in Des Moines and she’s all the way in… somewhere that’s a bit of a drive, I guess, because they’re living apart while she goes to nursing school, although does she stick with it or quit? Who knows! This is a movie about God and football, not occupational education!

Subsequent hardship and struggles make Kurt so sad, we get a scene in which he weeps and prays to his deity. Then, some time passes, an unclear amount of time, a smeary fudged length of time (Wikipedia: four seasons), during which Kurt leads the Barnstormers to a loss in the Arena Bowl championship (Wikipedia: it happened twice), and on that very day, a guy in a suit walks up to Kurt and says the St. Louis Rams, coached by NFL legend Dick Vermeil (Dennis Quaid), want him to come try out. Seems like a pretty long amount of time passed between the prayer and this moment, but you can’t definitively say they aren’t linked!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Well, fellow BOATS football movie Invincible, starring Mark Wahlberg as a regular average Joe-guy who came in off the street and won a roster spot with the Philadelphia Eagles, also featured Dick Vermeil as a character, played by Greg Kinnear. Otherwise, American Underdog is cut from the usual Rocky/Rudy/Remember the Titans inspirational-sports-movie cloth.

Performance Worth Watching: This is bland, bland stuff, so it’s hard to find a chunk of cottage cheese (plain, of course, no salt or pepper or berries) here that tastes much different than the other chunks in the container. But I will say Levi and Paquin cultivate enough earnest chemistry in the core love story to keep the film afloat.

Memorable Dialogue: Vermeil pulls Kurt aside and cements the movie’s higher-power themes: “Destiny – it belongs to the underdogs.”

Sex and Skin: None of that unholy stuff here!

Our Take: Of all the football guys to have a movie made about him, Kurt Warner is the one that fits the Hollywood cliche perfectly. His path from stockboy apron to Canton is a nice story, a conventional, feelgood, rags-to-riches narrative illustrating how a nice guy can finish first. How, exactly, he got there remains a bit of a mystery; American Underdog is more interested in showing us how he’s an average fella, and less compelled to show us how he’s more than just an average fella, because average fellas don’t lead The Greatest Show on Turf to football Valhalla. Does he study Xs and Os all night? Does he work out a lot? Does he have any natural talent? Does he have any interests outside of Brenda and her kids and chucking footballs against brick walls? What would compel him to sit down and eat THREE BURGERS? Dunno, even after spending nearly two hours with the guy.

Methinks the Erwin Bros. may be trying to cover too much ground with this biopic. It’s part romance, part sports movie, part faith movie, part tearjerker, in that order of priority, although when you think about it, the third one on the list is kind of the movie’s subtextual base. The filmmakers’ goal isn’t to show us the complexities of human existence, but rather, to inspire us to follow our dreams, because this guy did, and look at what happened. So destiny – or God, if you’re so inclined – is an active character here, one that’s emphasized over the ones who walk on two feet and use spoken language and eat food in order to survive (THREE BURGERS!). Cheers to the movie for avoiding the football-montage bologna and taking its time establishing Kurt and Brenda’s relationship, which seems to be the foundation upon which the man built his adult life. But it does so within the confines of melodrama, unafraid to show them fighting, too afraid to show them f—ing, but too timid in their characterizations to make them truly come alive as real people who aren’t scripted Movie Characters.

So American Underdog emphasizes the broad strokes, and doesn’t seem overly concerned that it’s a weirdly structured story that at times feels patched together haphazardly. It’s sloppy with the details; there’s a portion of the movie where Kurt wins a playoff game to send the Barnstormers to the championship, and then a whole series of events occur that should eat up weeks and months of his life, including proposing to and marrying Brenda, and there at the reception, one of his teammates says, “Arena Bowl, Kurt!”, making us wonder what child picked up the snow globe and shook it willy-nilly. (Wikipedia: He played in two consecutive Arena Bowls, so the sloppy timeline appears to have skipped a year.) Perhaps it’s a test of our faith, like the one Kurt faces when he says, “I just wonder why God would give me a dream that’s never gonna come true.” He works in mysterious ways I guess – and I guess that’s the big profound message of this film, take it or leave it.

Our Call: STREAM IT. American Underdog is a slightly unsightly mess of a movie that nonetheless might lift a spirit or two – especially if those spirits belong to religious types – and draw in NFL fans who haven’t read Warner’s autobiography. If you’re among these groups, you’re more likely to forgive the movie for its flaws.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.