The director Rod Lurie has had an eclectic career that often tilts toward the dark side — he has made films about the nitty-gritty of politics (“Nothing But the Truth,” “The Contender”), he did the remake of “Straw Dogs,” and he reached a new peak of artistry with “The Outpost” (2019), in which he drew on his experience as a combat veteran to craft a staggeringly authentic war film about the conflict in Afghanistan.
Given that track record, it’s a surprise to see Lurie direct a heart-tugging faith-based football drama released by Angel Studios. “The Senior” is a straight-down-the-middle-of-the-plate crowd-pleaser that’s been fashioned out of a true-life fairy tale: the story of Mike Flynt, who in 2007 rejoined his former West Texas college football team at the age of 59. It’s basically a soft-hearted paint-by-numbers TV-movie, stocked with homilies about the game of football vs. the game of life. Yet it’s an effective soft-hearted paint-by-numbers TV-movie.
Michael Chiklis, looking like Joe Rogan in about 10 years, plays Flynt with the heart and soul of a tough Teddy bear, and though the film is unabashedly manipulative (as is every movie released by Angel Studios), “The Senior” earns its lumps in the throat right along with its lumps on the field. After Flynt rejoins his old team, one of the coaches even says, “He’s like a 59-year-old Rudy!” That more or less nails it. “The Senior” is one of those sports films based on a real story that feels more like a movie than most made-up sports movies do.
When I was growing up, one of my favorite books — I read it over and over again — was “Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer.” It was an inside look at the 1967 season of the Green Bay Packers as told by Jerry Kramer, the Packers right guard who chronicled the insanely punishing discipline of being coached by Vince Lombardi, who ran the Packers’ training camp like a cross between a drill sergeant and a guard at Abu Ghraib. What astonished me about the book was the way it was equal parts pain and faith: Being an NFL lineman was about as bruising an ordeal as one could imagine, yet the players shared a reverence; before every game, they would pray. As Kramer captured it, their bone-and-muscle-crunching agony, like Lombardi’s coaching, was all part of a higher calling.
“The Senior,” too, is a film that locates that place in football where rehab meets rapture. The opening half hour sketches in the backstory, which feels almost too absurd to believe (though it actually happened, so we roll with it). The movie jumps back to 1970, when Flynt (played in the early scenes by Shawn Patrick Clifford) is the middle linebacker and team captain of the Lobos, the varsity squad of Sull Ross State University. He’s a leader with one vice: He likes to fight…too much. In fact, his need for fisticuffs gets him tossed out of school.
Cut to 37 years later. Mike, now played with a friendly glower by the bald and barrel-chested Chiklis, is a construction-site foreman, married for decades to Eileen (Mary Stuart Masterson), with several grown children. He’s doing all right. But he’s haunted by his bully of a father (lots of flashbacks to dad teaching the young Mike how to fight by calling him a “little runt” and punching him in the face), and when it comes to his own college-instructor son, Micah (Brandon Flynn), he’s less a supporting parent than a nagging narcissist, always trying to get the kid to follow in his jock footsteps.
It’s a 35-year college reunion that brings Mike together with his old teammates, where the kooky idea comes up that he could actually rejoin the team because he never finished his senior year. The film doesn’t get much into the technicalities (wouldn’t he have to reapply to college?); it cuts right to the coach, Sam Weston (Rob Corddry), treating Mike’s attempt to try out for the team like the joke it must surely be. But Mike, who has retained his fighting energy, wants this do-over as a kind of life metaphor. If he can play college football again, then maybe he can heal the past.
“The Senior” is a monumentally conventional and wholesome movie, full of training montages and scenes where Mike, who likes to play “The Rubberband Man” by the Spinners in his headset, confronts his new multi-racial team of bruisers and amateur rappers, only to discover that they’re mostly cool about the man they call “Fred Flintsone” and “Pops.” The real Mike Flynt has a Texas drawl, which I kind of wish Chiklis had adopted. Yet he makes Mike a prickly and devoted try-hard paragon you can’t help rooting for.
Mike makes the team, though not as a starting player. Once the season begins, the question becomes: Will he be allowed to play in a game? Or will the fear that he’s going to break his neck or paralyze his body make the coach keep him on the sidelines? (But if that anxiety is there, why did the coach let him onto the team in the first place? Oh, never mind.) Mary Stuart Masterson is excellent as the down-home wife who decides to stand by Mike even as she recognizes that he’s putting himself through some Texas-football version of therapy. And Chiklis is physically convincing — an aging bull who still knows how to move — as well as emotionally compelling, especially when he’s handed the task of giving the half-time hellbent/kick-ass/inspirational locker-room speech.
Mike discovers that his dark father kept a scrapbook of his son’s sports clippings, and that he also kept a Bible, inscribed with the words “Lord, give me the strength to forgive others. And myself.” If you think about it, that’s the inscription of a sociopath, but let’s not nitpick: The Angel Studios brand requires an injection of religious piety. Ever since the days of Jerry Kramer, it’s been axiomatic that football and faith go together, and “The Senior” turns that into a movie formula that works.
