Directed By Rod Lurie
Starring – Michael Chiklis, Mary Stuart Masterson, Brandon Flynn
The Plot – At 59, Mike Flynt (Chiklis) may be too old to be on a college football field, but not too old to feel the weight of unfinished business. After nearly four decades, he returns to his alma mater to take the hit that changed everything. Bruised, doubted, and nearly broken, he pushes for one more game, not for glory, but for the teammates he lost, the family he fractured, and the ending he still believes is possible.
Rated PG for thematic content, violence, adult language and a suggestive reference.
The Senior – Official Trailer (2025) Michael Chiklis, Mary Stuart Masterson
POSITIVES
The story of Mike Flynt is one of football, family, and especially faith, and while “The Senior” is ultimately categorized as a sports film, it’s really the moments off of the field that serve as its most meaningful storytelling, particularly in Mike’s inability to confront his past demons, in growing up with an abusive father that molded his own aggressions. The faith is definitely the crutch that the movie leans heavily on, in order to enact a transformation in character, by film’s end, but the newfound optimism that Mike enlists towards it isn’t preachy towards the audience, nor is compromising to its own ideals by brushing off anyone not involved in it, and considering the script takes ample time within its progression to focus committedly on those relationships centering around his life, as well as the regrets he has about essentially losing his youth from bad decision making, it coherently contextualizes the kind of flawed protagonist that neither condemns nor approves of his previous lifestyle, attaining an authentic approach to Mike’s life in ways that makes it effortless to feel his influence over the project. Besides the value off of the field, the film is also led tremendously by a highly charismatic performance from Michael Chiklis, who simultaneously articulates the stoicism and even immaturity of the character in ways that vividly outline his complacency in the past. Between randomized emotional outbursts and charming banter with many of his co-stars, Chiklis, at 62 himself, commands a complexity to the character that goes a long way towards triggering his eventual transformation, all with an appreciation for commitment during physical sequences involving drills in pads, that make his turn not only all the more believable, but also authentic considering he’s around the same age as the character he’s portraying. As for technical components, there are more misses than hits, unfortunately, but the elements of the production that does work seamlessly are those pertaining to the movie’s editing and its incorporation of real life stock footage during transition scenes, in order to further appraise such a remarkable story. The former manages to conjure as much momentum and urgency as possible to in-game sequences that are plagued with their own inferiorities, and the latter, while occasionally granting an outsider’s perspective to a story that constantly and refreshingly persists from within Mike’s condensed inner circle, taps into an essence of the environment for 2007, granting a deeper significance on the scale that the story was playing towards, offering the lone instance towards the production in which it attempts some semblance of flashiness to its art direction.
NEGATIVES
Sports movies anymore rarely captivate an audience towards an invigorating experience, and that’s because so many of their executions and script outlines feel interchangeably derivative with one another, an aspect that deeply plagues “The Senior” and its highly compelling story. Besides the screenplay hitting every branch on the cliche tree, with Lurie seemingly watching “Rudy” quite a few times before approaching the shooting of this film (The movie even refers to Mike as a 59-year-old Rudy), the storytelling in abrasively paced and unrelentingly rushed, undercutting meaningful beats within the story while offering the audience limited opportunities to invest in these characters or their ensuing conflicts. Such an example pertains to Mike’s tumultuously rocky relationship with his distant son, without many personal interactions between them, nor a meaningful confrontation to surmise a predictably eventual resolution. But even others pertain to characters going completely absent after their initial introductions for extended periods of time, or Mike’s classroom schooling being shown only once, or even the football aspect of the story being deduced to several music montages to lazily construct balance to the many aforementioned life beats, and it results in a complete lack of distinguished details to satisfy audiences into attaining a deeper grasp on the significance of the story, making me wish that I was watching a thorough documentary, instead of a feature length film that shills itself to theatrics, above all else. On top of the storytelling constantly falling flat, the execution of the game and practicing sequences are quite a mess to coherently interpret, especially with only an auto-zoom framing device that serves as the only ambition that the production takes on towards setting itself apart from predecessors that did it better. It hurts enough that the choreography of the actors lack any of the intensity or urgency of the game, making so many of these sequences feel like they’re playing out in slow motion, but it’s so much worse when the start of each edit during a game closes up on characters and actions that immediately blur the rest of the frame surrounding them, making these scenes virtually impossible to follow without the aid of on-the-nose narration from the in-game commentator. The direction from Lurie also contributes to the mediocrity of the engagement, with these ridiculously simulated melodramatic tones that make so many of the interactions between characters flourish with unearned dramatics. More times than not, the interactions are plagued by the hinderances of hip lingo crafted off-screen from a middle aged white man’s idea of what youths and African-Americans sound like, but once scenes transition to a confrontation between characters, you can count on exaggeratedly end of the world theatrics, in order to conjure some semblance of energy to unsubtle scenes that you could take the garbage outside during, and still feel like you haven’t actually missed anything that has transpired, leading to an atmosphere that wants so badly to leave audiences on the edge of their seats, yet can’t even properly muster enough speculation to inspire audiences to reach for their drinks, in order to break the monotony of the experience. This is further made worse by a swelling music score from Larry Groupe, featuring some of the most obviously meandering and manipulative tones that completely eviscerate any semblance of nuance or subtlety to scenes. If the music mixing of the compositions weren’t so blaringly abrasive, overriding the capable deliveries of a talented ensemble, then I could easily ignore them, however they’re so penetrating to the ears in a theater auditorium that they constantly echo intention in ways that make it feel like the production has no faith in the audience to capably interpret the emotional context of these scenes, in turn forcing Groupe to work overtime developing dramatic instrumentals that could easily be plucked from here and placed into any movie on the Hallmark Channel or Lifetime Television, if those channels wished to save time, energy, and money on a composer of their own.
OVERALL
“The Senior” goes deep with its real-life underdog story of resilience and perseverance, cementing uplifting inspiration to those with minimized expectations, but it ultimately stumbles out of bounds with a derivatively cliche’d outline and melodramatic enveloping, keeping it from being the second coming of one of the many 90’s sports drama’s that it unapologetically borrows from. While Michael Chiklis successfully rises to the occasion in a leading turn of radiant charisma and limit-pushing physicality, the story surrounding his Herculean efforts constantly sack his forward progress, resulting in a cheesy checklist of a biopic that adds nothing new to this familiar mold.
My Grade: 4.8 or D-