- Cliché Storm: While it does them reasonably well, the main complaint levelled against the film is it focuses on virtually every generic underdog sports movie trope, especially in the second half.
- Critical Dissonance: The film did much better with critics than with audiences; it has an 80% approval rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, but it has a 49% approval rating from audiences on the same site.
- Ensemble Dark Horse: The Queen of the Bronze City, for being a surprisingly warm Reasonable Authority Figure.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: While the film's premise of cavemen inventing football is both a funny and unique idea, this is only really shown in the prologue, with the rest of the film devolving into a cliché underdog sports movie that is only aesthetically set in a "primitive" period.
- Ugly Cute: Dug. He is a caveman with disheveled hair, pig nose, funny-looking teeth and he is somehow absolutely adorable.
- The Woobie:
- Dug and his tribe. Forced from their ancestral home with their only hope being a game they don't know how to play.
- Goona. A talented footballer who's forbidden from partaking solely because of her gender.
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