Producers: Spencer Beighley, Jamal Henderson, LeBron James, Marsai Martin, Joshua Martin and Timothy M. Bourne   Director: Anton Cropper   Screenplay: Zoe Marshall, Daniel Gurewitch and David Young   Cast: Marsai Martin, Omari Hardwick, Kelly Rowland, Rome Flynn, Elijah Richardson, Tony Gonzalez, Adrian Eppley, Trad Beatty, Hanani Taylor, Abigail Killmeier, Tyla Harris, Isac Ivan, Tony Romo and Jim Nantz   Distributor: Paramount+

Grade: C

Fans hungry for some pigskin action on those rare occasions when games are absent from networks, cable and streaming services can find temporary relief in this lightweight Nickelodeon family comedy.  It also serves as a promotional tool for the NFL and the Madden video game franchise distributed by EA Sports; both were involved in the production, which oddly enough attributes the “teleplay” to three scribes working from a “screenplay” by Richard T. Jones, Jeremy Loethen and Tim Olgetree—a curiously tangled credit.  

The domestic side of things centers on the Coleman family, dad Bobby (Omari Hardwick), mom Keisha (Kelly Rowland) and teen daughter Callie (Marsai Martin).  Bobby is a Heisman trophy winner whose twelve-year post-college career as a pro running back has been blighted by a tendency to fumble the ball.  A series of trades has led to the family’s repeated relocations (one wonders, given his history, why any team would have wanted him at all), and now they’ve wound up in Atlanta, where he must compete for playing time with the Falcons’ arrogant young hot-shot Anderson Fisher (Rome Flynn).  And when he gets on the field, his habit of dropping the ball persists. 

Meanwhile Callie, a math wiz, is trying to make friends at her new school.  She catches the eye of the Robotics club when she demonstrates her tech skill by using her phone to turn the campus sprinklers on some mean girls, and accepts their invitation to join them in trying to win a national contest.

She also shows off her expertise on the Madden Football video game series by thrashing all the team members at a party at Fisher’s mansion.  Her dad, whom Anderson beats, is furious when he finds out that she’s accepted Fisher’s gift of a pre-release copy of an addition to the series—one celebrating him—and they argue over it in a parking lot during a rainstorm.  As they try to wrest the game away from one another, a bolt of lightning strikes it.

Though neither is hurt—rather implausible, since it sends them both flying—there’s an aftereffect: Callie’s endowed with the power to direct Bobby’s actions on the field through the game, and her aptitude on the controller, combined with her mathematical insight into pigskin strategy, enables her to turn him into an absolute phenomenon.  Soon he’s challenging Fisher’s stats in yards gained and scoring touchdown after touchdown.

Everything seems great, even after Bobby learns what an important role Callie’s playing in his triumph.  Of course there are problems, as when Nate (Elijah Richardson), the handsome robotics guy Callie gets interested in, messes with the video game and makes Bobby do some pretty weird stuff, stoking Fisher’s suspicions that something is rotten in Atlanta.  Neither father nor daughter, moreover, is keen on keeping what’s happening from mom.  And the time she has to devote to manipulating Bobby’s moves on the field means that Callie falls behind in her robotics work, endangering her classmates’ preparation for nationals.

But a real crisis comes when Callie and Bobby argue about how his family has always played second fiddle to his determination to succeed on the field.  That leads to her using her control over his moves to make him do very peculiar things during a crucial game that commentators Tony Romo and Jim Nantz can’t help but wonder about.  It brings him to his senses and, wonder of wonders, helps restore both the family dynamic and his own career.

So long as Martin and Hardwick rein in their tendency to over-exuberance—something typical in Nick fare—they make a likable pair.  The movie is basically a father-daughter piece, and so no other cast members matter overmuch but for Flynn, who really goes overboard as their voluble antagonist; director Anton Cropper, known for his television work, probably should have brought along some chill pills.  (Tony Gonzalez, who plays the Falcons coach, is, of course, a former NFL player, while Romo and Nantz are actual broadcast commentators.  None of them excel in their roles here.)  Visually “Fantasy Football” has the glossy, bright look of a Nickelodeon sitcom, and moves along like one: credit (or blame) is due production designer Steven J. Jordan, cinematographer Anthony Hardwick and editor Sarah Lucky.  The energetic, intrusive score is by Kovas. 

Except for the incessant product placement, this cable-ready concoction is an inoffensive but instantly disposable piece of juvenile football fluff.

Producer: Roy Conli   Directors: Don Hall and Qui Nguyen   Screenplay: Qui Nguyen   Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Dennis Quaid, Jaboukie Young-White, Gabrielle Union, Lucy Liu, Karan Soni, Alan Tudyk, Adelina Anthony, Abraham Benrubi, Nik Dodani and Francesca Reale  Distributor: Walt Disney Studios

Grade: C

Presumably it was the lovely visuals that prompted Disney to decide that “Strange World” merited a theatrical release, rather than being relegated to a streaming premiere like so much of the studio’s recent product.  They do in fact have a wondrous “Avatar”-like color and luminosity, a testimony to the skill of the Disney animators led by Amy Lawson Smeed and Justin Sklar, production designer Merhdad Isvandi and effects supervisor Steve Goldberg.  If only the plot and characters equaled the animation, all would be well.  But they don’t, and as a result this winds up as a middle-grade entry in the Disney animated canon, closer to the bottom than the top.

The setting is a country called Avalonia, a small, bucolic place in a valley surrounded by high mountains that close it off from the rest of the world.  Jaeger Clade (voiced by Dennis Quaid), a burly explorer, is determined to traverse the peaks and find out what’s beyond them, and he insists on taking his son Searcher (Jake Gyllenhaal), a timid, querulous kid, along on the expedition.  But when Searcher discovers a glowing plant along the way, he insists on harvesting some of its bulbs and returning home.  Jaeger huffily disagrees and continues on his way alone.

Twenty-five years later, the bulbs have transformed Avalonia, turning it from a rustic backwater to a modernized society, powered by the energy they inexhaustibly supply.  Searcher is one of the chief growers of pando, as the plant is called, and has a happy, biracial family.  His wife Meridian (Gabrielle Union) is an experienced pilot, but utterly devoted to her family—Searcher and their sixteen-year old son Ethan (Jaboukie Young-White), whom his father sees as his successor on the farm but who’s by nature an adventurous sort, devoted to exciting video games and to thoughts of escaping his humdrum life.  Ethan is also gay, with a crush on Diazo (Jonathan Melo), a pal he’s too shy to express his feelings for openly.

For some viewers the character of the family will be a welcome sign of progress in Disney animated fare; for others it will be a calculated construct in which every diversity box has been dutifully checked off.  That view will be buttressed by the fact that even the family dog, Legend, is a three-legged mutt, perhaps a rescue animal, and that no one has the slightest discomfort with Ethan’s romantic inclinations.   (Of course, his open affection for Diazo will also mean that viewers in many areas of the world won’t be permitted to see the picture, except perhaps with excisions.)

In any event, a crisis erupts when pando begins to fail, affected by some inexplicable blight.  Avalonia’s president Callisto Mal (Lucy Liu) shows up to beg Searcher to join an expedition beneath the mountains to discover the cause and save their world.  He reluctantly agrees and joins the crew of her airship.  Unsurprisingly Ethan stows away despite his father’s stern orders to stay on the farm, and when she discovers her son’s absence, Meridian roars into action and arrives at the ship as well.  And there’s more: the group encounters Jaeger, who gave up his efforts to scale the mountains and decided to forge an underground route, but is still as intent as ever on getting to the other side.

Now with him aboard, the expedition continues into what seems like a psychedelic world under Avalonia filled with colorfully shimmering vistas and unusual creatures, some harmless and others threatening.  Ethan is attracted by his grandfather’s sense of adventure and goes exploring, which irritates Searcher to no end.  (In fact, the whole movie might have been titled “Fathers and Sons,” had not Turgenev coopted it, and done it better.)  The boy develops an especially close bond with a fluorescent blue blob that he names Splat, which is intended, along with crew member Caspian (Karan Soni), to provide some comic relief in a film that, to be honest, provides remarkably few laughs.

 Instead we get a great deal of interplay among characters that are, quite frankly, a pretty dull bunch (Jaeger introduces himself as “the one and only!” so often that you might feel like punching him out, and Searcher is a pretty limp milquetoast.)  The other major element is a heavy-handed ecological message about the dangers man’s actions pose to the world he must learn to live in harmony with rather than exploit in unthinking ways.  That message is delivered in a rather convoluted fashion involving the crew’s attempt to save the source of pardo via something analogous to pesticide-spraying, only to realize how misguided it is.  Kids might need a bit of help unpacking it all.   

Given the lack of verbal punch in the script by Qui Nguyen (who co-wrote the somewhat better “Raya and the Last Dragon”), the voice cast acquits itself reasonably well, but their level of commitment feels understandably low.  The pacing is off as well, with lots of repetition in action sequences—many chases and close calls—that lack excitement despite the efforts of editor Sara K. Reimers and composer Henry Jackman, whose score features familiar tropes with blaring brasses and not much else.    

But there are the imaginative visuals to fall back on.  They’re beautiful, but over the long haul even they start to pall in the face of the boring narrative and drab characters.