There’s a theory about Keanu Reeves’ hair and its relation to the quality of his films.  His best features (Speed and The Matrix) show the star sporting a closely cropped 'do, but his long-hair films are practically unwatchable (Chain Reaction and Little Buddha).  The hair hypothesis holds up for all of Keanu’s films since he began to alter the length of his locks, so early films like Bill & Ted and The River’s Edge don’t count in this controlled scientific study.

All you really need to know about The Replacements is that Keanu’s hair is long.  Case closed.  And if that’s not proof enough for you, consider the fact that the football film is being released a month before the sport’s season kicks off, cutting a wide path around Denzel Washington’s pigskin flick Remember the Titans, which is set to open September 29^th – after the NFL season is underway.

Keanu plays Shane “Footsteps” Falco, a star college quarterback that blew his chance at a professional career thanks to a horrific performance in the Sugar Bowl some four years before the film starts (please note that this would mean the 36-year-old actor is playing a 26-year-old character).  As the opening credits role, we learn that Falco is now employed as a Washington, D.C. barnacle scraper.

Falco’s life is turned upside-down when he’s visited by interim Washington Sentinels Coach McGinty (Gene Hackman, Enemy of the State), who has recently been hired by the team’s owner (Jack Warden, perhaps reprising his role as Max Corkle from Heaven Can Wait) to field a team of replacement players after the league is hit by a players' strike with four games remaining in the season.  If the Sentinels win three, they’re in the playoffs.  If you’ve seen The Bad News Bears, you can pretty much figure out the outcome of each game the instant you learn the Sentinels' magic number.

Of course, like any other comedic sports film, the other players with whom McGinty chooses to fill his roster are a rag-tag bunch of undesirables.  There’s a psychotic ex-Marine-turned-SWAT-team-member (Jon Favreau, Very Bad Things), a chain-smoking ex-soccer player nicknamed “the Leg” (Rhys Ifans, Hugh Grant’s scene-stealing roommate from Notting Hill), two giant security guards (Faizon Love, Three Strikes and Michael Taliferro, Life), a sumo wrestler (Ace Yonamine, in his film debut) and a professional shoplifter, a.k.a. the really fast guy that can’t catch the ball until the last play of the last game (Orlando Jones, the "Make-7-Up-Yours" guy).  With twenty-two starters on a football team, each character has to be significantly wacky, otherwise you won’t be able to tell them apart.

Here’s something I bet you didn’t know – when football players go on strike, so do the cheerleaders.  At least that’s what they’ll have you believe in The Replacements.  Brooke Langton (Melrose Place) plays the captain of the Sentinels’ dance squad who, for some reason, needs to find a team of cheerleading scabs.  This whole subplot is tossed in just so Falco can have a love interest.  It’s boring, time-consuming and makes absolutely no sense.

Speaking of not making sense, here are some other major problems with The Replacements (and I only wish I had space to list them all).  Last time I checked, football’s regular season ended in December, but you’d never know that from watching this film.  Even with unseasonably warm weather in Washington, you’d expect people to be wearing coats, or to see people’s breath in the outdoor football stadium.  Sentinel players inexplicably switch from defense to offense, and, for some reason, the annoying broadcast team of John Madden and Pat Summerall are assigned to each of the Sentinels last four games.

The Replacements was directed by Howard Deutch, who has gone from making ‘80s John Hughes brat-pack films (Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful) to ‘90s old-codger films (Grumpier Old Men, The Odd Couple II).  The sorry script was written by Vince McKewin (Fly Away Home), and he crafts an ending with the predictability and excitement of a political convention.  Reeves shows as much emotion as a baked potato, and The Replacements just plain blows compared to the marginally entertaining Any Given Sunday.  That is unless you’re talking about product placement – then The Replacements would be much better.

On a disturbing note, The Replacements is the second mainstream film I’ve seen this year where it seems okay for black characters to use derogatory names (like “Pork Rice”) when addressing Asian characters (the other was Romeo Must Die).  Once again, I ask you to imagine a white character calling a black character “Spear Chucker” or “Porch Monkey” (and the picketing and marches that would be sure to follow).

1:55 -