YMMV / The Replacements (2000)

• Best Known for the Fanservice: The cheerleaders are probably just as good a reason to watch the movie as the actual players are.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: If you like this movie at all, then it's hard to find anyone who isn't popular to some degree, but there are a few standouts among the secondary and tertiary characters.
  • Lightning Bruiser and part-time Rabid Cop Danny Bateman.
  • Deaf player Brian Murphy. The fact that it was his actor's first role helps.
  • The highly athletic butterfingers and regular stock boy Clifford Franklin.
  • The cheerleader/strippers, obviously.
  • Nigel, the Welsh kicker.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • McGinty's speech about fear before the San Diego game.
  • The return of Shane in the final game and the others reactions.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Michael Jace playing Wilkinson, a convict on loan to the team. Jace killed his wife in 2014 and is serving a 40-year sentence for second degree murder.
  • The fact that Shane sustained three concussions during his college football career is a throwaway line. Later, he gets knocked down by his own team member and is disoriented for a few seconds, which is played for laughs. Within a decade after the movie's release, however, research on CTE among NFL players demonstrated that multiple concussions were doing permanent brain damage. These findings led the league to introduce new concussion protocols which would prevent Shane from returning to play if he were disoriented, and would permanently disqualify him if he had four diagnosed concussions.
• Moe: Deaf player Brian Murphy, due to his All American Boy looks, kind nature, and sign-language flirting with one of the strippers and stunned, embarrassed reaction to her making an explicit suggestion.
• So Bad, It's Good: Danny (Cop) and Earl's (Convict) reaction to Shane's 'can't we all just get along?' interrupting their argument in jail.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: By not showing the owners reaction to their defiance (or Martel doing poorly after he let him back in) in the final game.
• Values Dissonance: The players on strike are portrayed as spoiled, greedy millionaires who are paid millions to play a game. However, recent research has shown that the enormous physical punishment suffered by pro football players put them disproportionately at risk for long-term brain damage that causes early onset of severe dementia, not to mention the many long-term physical health issues - disproportionate amounts of aches, pains, limps, early arthritis, etc. that would be more appropriate to a person in their seventies, not their forties or even late thirties. The NFL does not cover the exorbitant costs of long term care for former football players with it, who tend to die young, penniless, and sometimes at their own hands as a result. Coupled with owners routinely threatening to move their teams (and in some cases, have) if taxpayers will not publicly finance a new stadium, a lot of people would perceive the players in this day and age very differently.
  • It doesn't help their case when Martell is attempting to explain why $5 million a year isn't actually that much and Lamont complains about the high cost of insurance on a Ferrari.
  • Roger Ebert even pointed this out in his review of the film.
  "The movie's approach to labor unions is casual, to say the least. Reeves and all of his teammates are scabs, but The Replacements can't be bothered with details like that, and indeed seems to think the regular players are the bad guys. The standard way the media handles such situations is to consider striking players as overpaid and selfish. Of course owners, sponsors and the media, who dine off the players' brief careers, are more overpaid and more selfish, but that's the way the world turns."
• Unintentional Period Piece: For starters, John Madden (who makes a significant appearance in his role as a sports commentator) retired in 2009 and died in 2021. Also, as explained in Harsher in Hindsight, this film was made long before the NFL added more strenuous concussion protocols to their rules that would probably keep Shane Falco out of the game forever.

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