The Comebacks

Born loser Lambeau “Coach” Fields (Koechner) must take a band of lovable misfits and lead them to high-school football glory in this vacuous spoof of inspirational sports films. The Comebacks irrefutably signals a precipitous decline in the quality of goofy sports comedies—a genre that reached its Scott Bakula–ized zenith in 1991 with the evergreen gridiron classic Necessary Roughness. Not even a gutsy performance from Rocky’s Carl Weathers could prevent shuddering at Coach Fields’s end-of-film mention of a possible sequel—which would inevitably be more painful than receiving a full-speed, open-field hit from Michael Strahan.