The Senior

Lurie is especially good at the narrative and character elements of the practice and game scenes, using them to move the story forward and build to the kind of resolution we look for in underdog sports stories with compelling emotional stakes.

At its heart, The Senior is about forgiveness and second chances.

It’s basically a soft-hearted paint-by-numbers TV-movie, stocked with homilies about the game of football vs. the game of life. Yet it’s an effective soft-hearted paint-by-numbers TV-movie.

For an hour or so, director Lurie tackles the tropes lightly as we see lots of football practices, and a few games, and not a lot of anything else. And it plays, helped by the fact that the formidable Masterson doesn’t need a lot of script to get across a flinty “West Texas Gal.”

You can simply surrender yourself to the bland moral lessons of the movie, but even then, it’s hard not to feel like this was best left as a quirky human interest segment on a slow news day.

"The Senior" is a solid underdog story film about forgiveness and second chances. Based on the true story of Mike Flynt, a 59-year-old grandfather who discovered that, through a technicality, he was still eligible to play college football. Michael Chiklis is very well cast as the pugnacious Flynt, who qualifies as both a senior (as in, a college senior) and a senior (as in, eligible for AARP). Rod Lurie is especially good at the narrative and character elements of the practice and game scenes, using them to move the story forward and build to the kind of resolution we look for in underdog sports stories with compelling emotional stakes.