Touchback: Worth It In the End

When I first saw the trailer for Touchback, I rolled my eyes. Why, you ask? Well, based on the trailer, the plot of this movie seemed to be one of those “this meets that” Hollywood mash-ups that appear to be solely profit driven. You know those movies I’m talking about… there’s Ernest Goes to Jail, Leprechaun 5: in ‘Da Hood, all those Not Another [blank] Movie movies, etc. These are all devolutions where the studio execs on duty must imagine that smashing the scenarios of two successful film types together will make a singular sub-par film somehow doubly successful. Of course, this is the “studio exec as bumbling villains” scenario, and all writers believe it a little bit in their hearts when we see these kinds of film. To believe anything else would entrap our minds into a confusion-mobius, and we’d never be able to think again.

So, what does Touchback have in common with the grim films above? Well, the trailer shows us a broken down farmer named Scott Murphy (Brian Presley). Scott used to be a high school football star with top colleges lining up to give him full-ride scholarships. But nowadays it seems Scott has run into a bit of money trouble, and he’s in danger of losing everything—until he gets a chance to do it all over again. He suddenly finds himself back in his old high school days. Will he do things differently now, or will the bonds he made originally pull him into intentionally making the same mistakes again? Do you see what I mean? The trailer makes it seem like it’s Friday Night Lights meets 18 Again.

Needless to say, I was not expecting much from this movie. There’d be the typical “farming is hard and takes heart” tropes; and the “poor man doesn’t know how good he’s got it” trope; and of course, there was the “evil banker who takes away the house” trope. And that is exactly how the film sort of laid it all out. Scott’s life was hard, he couldn’t catch a break, but he had a family and a town that loved him, but that wasn’t enough for Scott, and so he was angry all the time. Now all of that intro plot took about an hour which was way too long. We are overly set up and primed for the second half where Scott goes back to high school.

And this second half is where the film changes. All of the backstory is in place, now to see what Scott does with it. And he does marvelously well. Scott is reliving his youth with an older mentality of hindsight. He now sees what an utter tool he used to be and works to change his actions. He is nice to the nerdy Todd White (Kevin Covais), who he used to terrorize. He pursues his future wife Macy (Melanie Lynskey) even though she’s a band geek and social pariah, and even though he is already dating the hottest girl in school, lead cheerleader Jenny (Sarah Wright). And he decides way ahead of time that he’s not going to make the fatal mistake that prematurely ended his football career. As we follow Scott, the film is fresh and interesting. I found myself genuinely engaged. I was rooting for him in his attempts to woo Macy, and I was hoping he would do well in his attempts to fit back in to his old life because it seemed to matter to Scott, and somehow I had started to like this character even though he seemed so two-dimensional in the beginning.

I’m going to skip describing the end in this review because I feel like the filmmakers really ramped it up to make it great, and I wouldn’t want to spoil anything for you. But just so you know, the last third or fourth of the film is where all the drama is hiding. And boy does it smash you over the face with a chair. I was blubbering uncontrollably during most of it.

And now that I have looked back at this movie with fresh eyes and the perspective of hindsight, I can say that despite the overly long introduction, this movie was enjoyable, pretty good even. It wasn’t “great” but few films are, so that’s fine. And its enjoyability isn’t a fluke either, because this movie isn’t a mash-up like I had originally feared. It’s a remake that has taken a lot of liberties. There is a lot of stuff based on It’s a Wonderful Life in this movie. And while it does lack in some areas, once you get past the intro, it’s decent. There were some faults with staying too long with the depressing intro which caused there to be a lack of scenes that should have been there (i.e., more town interaction to make the character interactions in the middle more believable and to really sell the ending), but overall, the lack of these scenes wasn’t too distracting.

So see it. If a jaded fool like me has to pull out the hankies, then a normal happy person such as yourself (wink, wink) is bound to really have a moving experience.