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Starring Scott Bakula, Robert Loggia. This was sort of like the Bad News Bears go to college, play football, and pick up a female player... only worse. I was shocked to see Mace Neufeld's name listed as one of the producers of this film. Here's a guy who's also produced the multi-million dollar blockbusters The Hunt for Red October, The Saint, Clear and Present Danger, and Patriot Games who decides to take on a project starring Scott Bakula as a 34 year old playing football for what could arguably be called the worst college football team of all time, a distinction that includes Northwestern's non-point shaving teams of the late '80's.Bakula, who as a quarterback is a quantum leap from his forte, in not the problem with this movie though. The problem here at hand is that Necessary Roughness is the most inaccurate and completely off base sports movie Hollywood has ever produced. The technical advisors on this film could very well have been two curlers from Saskatchewan. I made a special point to watch the credits very carefully and did not see any 'technical advisor' credit. It showed miserably. The dean of Texas Southern University (T.S.U.), like the owner of the Indians in Major League, wants the football team to fail, but, unlike the Indians owner, the dean of T.S.U. has no apparent reason for this desire. I guess that this way T.S.U. would be able to lose millions of dollars from their alumni and corporate sponsors and would get absolutely no national media exposure. At one point in time, the dean, played by Larry Miller, who basically reprised this idiot role in the remake of The Nutty Professor, takes a stack of the football teams already graded exams and announces to the professor that he is going to "regrade" them on a stricter basis. I was aghast. Even more so than when I found out that the special teams players practiced with the offensive and defensive teams, that there were only two coaches for the entire teams, that T.S.U.'s entire roster consisted of no more than 20 players, that the coach allowed a female place-kicker on the team--the female part isn't bad, his allowing her to shower with the guys in their locker room is--and that during the last game of the season, the interim head coach yells to his offensive line, "That's a blitz, watch it!" I have no idea what cave the screenwriters were living in when they wrote this script, but if it weren't for the negative juggernaut of Hudson Hawk in 1991, this movie could have been the worst of the year. The idea of a 34 year old going to college for the first time was humorous--the Thornton Melon syndrome--and occasionally laughs were had with this notion. Unfortunately, the great majority of Necessary Roughness focuses on the completely unrealistic T.S.U. football team. The Program is everything this movie wanted to be and more. Rent The Program instead.
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