Do I really have to review Gracie?  I mean, I guess if I can try to avoid the specifics in here, I can just recycle the review for future clones that inhibit the sports drama of over-coming the odds, but it just seems so redundent to have to review a film you’ve already seen, and will see again a lot in the future.

Gracie
2 Stars

Gracie is never a bad film, it’s just a repeat of countless other films that came before it.  Why should you go out to the megaplex and plunk down all of your hard-earned money on a rerun?

Gracie wants to play soccer, but can’t because she’s a chick.  Boo hoo, whatever; come back when you can give me a movie where I care about the characters.  It’s not a total mess-up – the lead of Carly Schroeder can hold her own, and Dermot Mulroney is actually pretty good as the father who trains his daughter to play like a son.  Still recovering from a death in the family, he doesn’t know how to reconnect with his family, and doesn’t know how to connect in the first place with his only daughter.  This isn’t quite a noteworthy performance, but it is solid and the only above-average aspect in a movie full of average.

But the plot is just blah.  I mean, if Gracie is the first film you ever see, it just might have you cheering on the heroine as she trains to be the best, but if not it’s just going to feel like a Disney Channel movie that twinges just a shade or two darker.  But the worst part is the over-exaggerated misogyny.  Here’s how half of the men think in the film: “Whoa – what?  Wait, you’re telling me that a girl wants to play soccer?

That’s outrageous!  Not only will I try to keep her from playing at all, but I’ll go out of my way to foul her and give her a bloody nose, because I don’t think a woman’s place is anywhere outside of a Kitchen!”  As a man, I can say that I’m honestly offended by this.  I mean, I can understand that political correctness was different in the 70s (when the film takes place,) but the men in this film are so unnecessarily discriminatory that I can’t take it seriously, and the fact that Bro-Seller-Outer director Davis Guggenheim paints men this cruelly seems like just too easy a method to use to get the audience on your side.

You know, I’ll give this much to Gracie.  Aimed at a demographic of young girls, it may be the first sports drama that they ever see; and maybe if its their first experience with it, it will be a fun one.  But there’s just not anything here for veterans of the genre.