I personally think we’re overdue for a look at kids sports movies on the big screen. Movies like the Mighty Ducks, The Sandlot, or Little Big League are really fun and sometimes quite amazing (The Sandlot had previously been in my Subjective 100). I fondly look back, I think because I only remember the good ones. But then you watch The Big Green, and you realize just how awful a bad version of this movie is. Aimed solely for 5 year olds, this movie, as Marge Simpson once said, is a “Big Lame.”
See if you have heard of this plot before. Our story begins in a sleepy small town in Texas (thankfully, fictional). The town has been hit with bad luck, and the kids have been drifting through life underachieving. Enter adorable spunky British teacher (Olivia d’Abo), who wants to make these lives better. She’s SO crazy she proposes they learn soccer, that CRAZY overseas sport no one plays in Texas (ok, that might be somewhat true). It turns out, they just got a Mexican transfer (Anthony Esquivel) who can help the teacher win with the kids, in turn teaching them how to win. Oh, and since the teacher is single, turns out, there’s an Andy Griffith squeaky clean cop (Steve Guttenberg) to pair her with! Oh and also coincidentally, there’s an awful soccer powerhouse with an awful coach (Jay O. Sanders) sitting there to be dethroned!!!! There’s also a really cute goat for no reason. A 5 year old could write that story.
Logic errors in a movie are infuriating, but The Big Green’s are especially so, because of how the mask it by trying to be funny. The problem is, this movie has within it maybe 5 or 6 quarter chuckles, mistaking funny accents and poop as a punchline (see, 5 year old screenplay). The director also bafflingly uses fast motion through punchlines of jokes, as if she were sitting at home watching home movies put it on fast forward, thought that the voices were funny sped up, and made that the punchline more than a few times. So when jokes are dumb, and wasting your time, you start to identify those logic gaps. Some of them are f’ing hilarious: in the setup for the soccer in the rain montage, one of the coaches says “Look, they’re playing better.” When they cut to the kids, you’d expect them to be in some sort of soccer formation. Instead, they’re in a mini circle, passing the ball between each other, like 5 year olds, or like they can just walk in and out of school with no teacher seeming to care. REPEATEDLY. Just…dumb. Some of the errors are baffling: The movie sets up this small town the kids are from against the big city kids in Austin Texas. But give us a shot of ANY tall building, this soccer field looks like it is in the middle of NOWHERE, which makes no sense. And then the infuriating: so we’re in Texas, a state on the Mexican border. A kid named Juan comes into class. The Vice-Principal calls him “Juwan.” COME ON!!!! You’re telling me this octogenarian vice-principal in Texas has NEVER heard or seen the name Juan in her life? What makes it most infuriating is the writer thinks this is just hilarious, which means she cares 0% about her craft and just getting this thing done quickly for a cash grab.
Another gaping hole here is character development. The adults are a big pile of whatever. Olivia d’Abo is blandly pretty and enthusiastic. Steve Guttenberg should be thanking the Stonecutters for his career, cause he sucks here at the least Texas police officer I have ever seen. Jay O. Sanders is doing a crappier version of his Angels in the Outfield character. But here’s the kicker, pun intended: the end of this movie involves penalty kicks. For you non soccer fans, that means 5 kickers plus the goaltender, so 6 kids will be very important in who wins the game for The Big Green. Of the six kids, I didn’t even RECOGNIZE that 2 of them were on the team. This screenplay is so awful that you couldn’t take a team of 12 kids and make 6 of them interesting. You have TWINS!!!! Make one score and one miss, come on!!! Oh and I’m sorry but you don’t get to blame this on the fact that the kids aren’t good actors. You have two kids from the Sandlot, one from Little Big League, and one from Little Rascals. That’s 4 right there! And the other 2 are the lead kids in YOUR MOVIE!!! Man this screenplay sucks.
The Big Green is an eye roll movie. You roll your eyes at the adorable kids who are clearly told to just be adorable and that’s it. You roll your eyes and the manic pixie dream girl teacher who makes these kids lives better because she cares at all. You roll your eyes at the Swiss cheese story logic and how you know exactly where the story will end. Hopefully, after all this eyerolling, you have dizzied yourself so much that you just pass out for an hour and a half, and forget The Big Green existed. Just like this movie forgot how to play soccer. Sorry, did I say forgot, I meant asked their friend to give them a 5 minute overview of the game and just ran with that information.