As the title implies, Fantasy Football Ruined Our Lives (now streaming on Netflix) lampoons excessive sports fandom, primarily among men, you won’t be shocked to learn. Let it be revealed right up front that the more you know about football – or soccer, if you’re into the whole American thing – the greater your appreciation for this Italian comedy by director Alessio Maria Federici (Four to Dinner), who ropes in a few notable Euro football figures for cameos and makes enough references to fill San Siro Stadium. That may inhibit your appreciation for its jokes, but the (pun incoming, with apologies) goal here is to poke fun at how all-consuming the hobbies of armchair sports fans can be. If it helps, we American football people can always sub out Leonardo Pavoletti and Pierluigi Pardo for Saquon Barkley and Joe Buck, since the names may be different, but the satire is pretty much the same.
The Gist: I’m lunging on this opportunity to point out that sports fans can be some of the biggest NERDDDDSSSSS ever. They’re essentially cosplayers cheering for violence and/or imperialistic strategies, and if you add in all the charts and rules and numbers involved with fantasy leagues – well, they’re basically playing the sports version of Dungeons and Dragons. And if you’re not familiar with some of the basic ins and outs of fantasy football, I’ll quickly fill you in so you don’t get lost (although you might be better served watching just about any other movie). Essentially: You have a “league” consisting of a handful of participants who assemble their own “team” of players selected among active rosters of real teams. You acquire those players before the real sports season starts, in a draft or, in the parlance of this movie, an auction. You track each player’s stats – the more those players score or make plays, the more points your fantasy team tallies. At the end of the season, the team with the most points wins either glory (in this movie, it’s a trophy) or a cash prize consisting of the total of the players’ entry fees.
Pretty simple (until you get into nuances and variations in rules, which we won’t do here, for the sake of everyone’s sanity). And time-consuming. You have to be committed and you have to know your shit, so casual non-nerds need not apply. Then again, it requires making some Nostradamus-y predictions about whether the shit you know will earn you points, so there’s a lot of luck involved too. If you decide to participate, let it be known you’re likely to annoy the people around you, who inevitably must listen to you fret endlessly about the status of their teams. Full disclosure, I am an American football uberfan who doesn’t participate in fantasy football. Because the tension of trying to supernaturally will your favorite real team to win a championship by wearing the same disgusting lucky socks all season or whatever is stressful enough without having to do a bunch of lousy math and paperwork.
Now before we realize that sports fandom is ridiculous and illogical in all forms and we may be morons for participating in it we have to talk about this movie, about a group of Italian football maniacs – not to be confused with hooligans, who sometimes function like violent gangs – who we first see in the midst of an epic bachelor party, running higgledy-piggledy out of a burning house trailed by lady strippers in schoolgirl uniforms, howling that the groom has gone missing. How’d they get to this point? Well, it’s all iterated to a judge after everyone’s arrested, so the movie flashes back to the beginning, when this group lost one of its eight members in a horrific accident, which really made the fantasy season complicated. I mean, the guy had the gall to be squished to death by a falling slab of concrete right before the auction, prompting everyone else to stage a ridiculously elaborate recruitment process to fill his spot, and in passing, possibly offer condolences to his pregnant widow. And you’re not gonna believe what they do next: They award the highly coveted seat at their table to – GASP – a girl.
Now let’s inventory these dorks. Our protagonist is Simone (Giacomo Ferrara), an unemployed screenwriter who started the league with his lifelong bestie Gianni (Enrico Borello), who’s about to get married. Federico (Antonio Banno) is a gay lawyer, Jacopo (Francesco Giordano) is big into recreational drugs, Nicola (Francesco Russo) is a put-upon family man with a baby daughter, Francesco (Giacomo Bottoni) is a shut-in who participates remotely and Fabrizio may or may not exist because he’s almost never there. Their eighth, the girl, is Andrea (Silvia D’Amico), and you will not be in the least bit surprised to learn that she makes things complicated because Simone has a crush on her but is too anxious to act on it. Meanwhile, hijinks ensue because all of these people have a severe case of arrested development, perhaps Andrea too even if she’s not as far gone. And those hijinks lead to the bachelor party fiasco, and Gianni going AWOL from his own wedding. To use an on-the-nose metaphor, I think that’s a red card in the game of real life.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Also on Netflix is Ultras, a dead-serious drama about Italian football hooligans — and Happy Gilmore 2, which does for golf (times about a million) what FFROL does for European soccer. But FFROL is mostly a sports-oriented riff on silly comedies like The Hangover or Grown Ups, mixed with a little bit of the late, great FX comedy series The League.
Performance Worth Watching: If D’Amico wasn’t here to be a representative of (highly relative) reason, this collection of caricatures passing as characters might be even less fun to be around than they already are.
Memorable Dialogue: Simone’s sentiments on his fantasy-football pals: “With our friends, we can be who we really are: horrible people.”
Sex and Skin: One head up one skirt in one non-graphic scene.
Our Take: The old assertion you have to admire their commitment falls apart in the presence of these characters, formulated by hyperbole-seeking screenwriters to be quasi-lovable losers who can blame their varying degrees of unsuccess in real life on their obsession with fantasy football. Not that FFROL offers any real insight into extreme fandom and obsession, dead-set as it is on using the setup as a springboard for lukewarm comedy and a plot chock-full of rivalries, infidelities, betrayals, drug trips and other bromidic familiarities, none of it particularly memorable. We get juvenile dick jokes and slo-mo vomit shots that seem plucked out of low-to-middle-tier Adam Sandler yukfests, and the same goes for the shambolic structure of the story, which can’t decide if it wants to follow a plot or be a hangout movie, so it kind of does neither.
If that isn’t enough to dissuade you from watching, allow me to reiterate that this movie has a lot of inside baseball about football, neé soccer. The judge character exists as an audience analog, a perplexed outsider looking into the meager but complicated existences of these fantasy football losers, and asking in so many words, WTF? It doesn’t help you clock any of the celeb cameos, but at least you won’t feel so alone as you navigate the screenplay’s awkwardly nested flashbacks and the broad peccadilloes of these thinly rendered jokes passing as characters. The movie is vaguely pleasant, not hilarious, gently amusing perhaps; it works through a lot of cliches and, after a while, it feels drawn-out and tiresome. I was left with the nagging feeling that FFROL could have taken a harder left into insightful character studies, or a harder right into OTT raunch, but instead chose the bland middle path, where it’s content to exist as nothing special at all.
Our Call: Fantasy Football Ruined Our Lives boasts plenty of potential in its core concept, but its wishy-washy execution only leaves us with the vague notion that we might’ve just watched an almost-funny movie. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.