The Mosquito Bowl review – Netflix mixes football, war and cliches in slick by-the-numbers saga

Peter Berg’s handsomely made second world war drama about a football game before the battle of Okinawa is stirring but filled with eye-rolling dialogue Forgive me, but it is difficult to not to be a little cynical about The Mosquito Bowl, Peter Berg’s grimly serious action featur

Peter Berg’s handsomely made second world war drama about a football game before the battle of Okinawa is stirring but filled with eye-rolling dialogue Forgive me, but it is difficult to not to be a little cynical about The Mosquito Bowl, Peter Berg’s grimly serious action feature situated (and marketed during many an NFL game) at the intersection of two predominant male interests: football and the second world war. Though both are certainly rich topics for cinema, and though I have been a fan of many a football/war story – most especially Berg’s NBC series Friday Night Lights – it is, let’s say, a tricky time for movies filled with dubiously nostalgic patriotism and masculinity. The trailer practically drips with a borderline parodic virility: a cadre of handsome up-and-coming male actors streaked with dirt; a group of men “trained for glory” and “called to war”, triumphantly hoisting aloft footballs, beer and guns to ponderous music.

But Berg is a capable and battle-tested director who knows his way around both a clock-ticking thriller ( Deepwater Horizon , Lone Survivor ) and the football field. So while The Mosquito Bowl, adapted for Netflix by Berg and Mark L Smith from a nonfiction book by Buzz Bissinger, fulfills its promise of American male pablum – there is many a clunky monologue about honor and duty and the “white buzz” of adrenaline – it also delivers on competently made, absorbing action sequences. (In huge news for Friday Night Lights fans, the football scenes here are once again scored by Explosions in the Sky.) Both in sport and in war, Berg has a knack for grace within visual cacophony and chaos; graphic sequences in battle and from the 1944 Christmas Eve pickup game at Guadalcanal that gives the film its name suggest, far more than its anvil-heavy dialogue, the connections between the gridiron and the battlefield, how the fleetness and camaraderie of sport can be wielded for survival and killing.

There is a stomach-churning catharsis in experiencing, as in Sam Mendes’s 1917 or Alex Garland’s Warfare , the real-time brutality and capriciousness of war. Continue reading...