The All-Time Top Five Football Movies

With so much pop culture in the world, it’s hard to know what’s best. Fortunately, Media Magpies has you covered, as one of our writers will occasionally share what they have determined to be The All-Time Top Five. 

Are you ready for some football? Of course you are! The spectacle of extreme violence clearly bound within a rectangle, keeping the viewer safe from the carnage within, is a special kind of entertainment that can’t be found anywhere else — except, of course, at the movies. While the cinema’s language of dreams is particularly apt for depictions of baseball, its unparalleled ability to depict aggressive action and bone-shattering impact align it with America’s true national pastime. But while football now occupies Monday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, there are still precious hours to fill with with televisual brutality, and for that you have The All-Time Top Five Football Movies (and of course you can suggest your own in the comments):

70,000 Witnesses — “It’s a clean sport,” an observer says of college football in the lead-up to the game between State and University (yes, those are the names); this comes shortly before a pep rally cheerfully lynches a dummy of an opposing team’s player. But those are wholesome shenanigans compared to the intrusion of Gamblor mobsters and their desire to fix the contest in order to secure a big betting payday. The star player collapses just before reaching the end zone for a go-ahead touchdown, his death is later determined to be an “explosion of the brain.” But how? The intrepid detective hero of the film hits upon a solution to smoke out the killer — replay the entire game, play by play, in order to “get the guys so hopped up and hysterical someone will crack!” The solution to violence is more violence and of course this works, as the culprit is baited into reproducing his nefarious scheme (and nearly killing yet another player in the process). Justice is done as the killer and the instigating mobster explode their entire bodies after a nitroglycerine incident following a locker room confrontation. The bloodshed flows off the field — a chilling portent of things to come.

The Dark Knight Rises — Tom Landry. Bear Bryant. Bane. Groundbreaking strategists with unique headgear who knew how to shake up a football field. Literally, in Bane’s case — this molder of men motivates his squad and hoodwinks his opponents with a surprise play to blow up Gotham Stadium at the start of a big game, making football’s violent underpinnings literal as explosions sink the field below the turf. The decision to do this after the National Anthem is sung in the clear, innocent tones of a boy soprano is clearly an ironic counterpoint –the sanitized and pure depiction of righteous conflict shattered and exposed as lie — but the game remains the game, as Pittsburgh Steelers great Hines Ward manages a touchdown return even as the arena collapses around him. And Ward’s desperate run past teammates and opponents alike falling into the abyss becomes a potent metaphor for players trying to outrun the effects of the game on their bodies, most notably CTE, as their fellow competitors fall.

Black Sunday — Bane’s action takes place among phony teams in a comic book movie, as a kind of “fantasy football,” but the NFL was once prepared to let terrorists incinerate its most holy event: Super Bowl Sunday. Footage from the actual Super Bowl X between the Steelers (for real this time) and the Dallas Cowboys, at Miami’s Orange Bowl, appears throughout the climax of the film, which involves crazed Vietnam vet Bruce Dern (football is often compared to war, but Dern is bringing the war home) trying to detonate an 80,000 pound Claymore mine at the big game. This will of course be accomplished by using the actual Goodyear Blimp. The NFL not only let John Frankenheimer film scenes of his heroes running around the stadium during the actual Super Bowl, they allowed “SUPER BOWL” to be plastered all over the blimp itself — although a fake blimp was used for the climax of the dirigible crashing into the stadium (this was filmed after the actual game and used a fake football team, the Miami Dolphins, as extras). The verisimilitude provided by real-life football action was obviously a plus for the filmmakers, but it was cheerfully backed by the game’s curators as well — a canny understanding that to be attacked is a recognition of importance. What could sanctify the sport’s violence more than its status as a target for further destruction?

The Split — Why should football legend Jim Brown play in a game when he could rob it? Brown recruits an incredible string of actors — Ernest Borgnine, Donald Sutherland, Jack Klugman and Warren Oates — to hit the Los Angeles Coliseum during a playoff game, when gameday tickets are paid for in cash. The plot is from a Richard Stark novel, the footage once again comes from a real NFL contest and the rough and tumble action on the field mirrors the hard-nosed heisting behind the scenes at the stadium. Brown’s crew and the Los Angeles Rams use coordinated physicality to dominate their weak and unprepared opponents (stadium security, the Atlanta Falcons) en route to a runaway victory. But that camaraderie in service of a shared goal soon evaporates for the robbers and they succumb to paranoia and infighting, their viciousness fatally turned on each other. Teamwork is what makes the scheme work, and The Split is a cautionary tale about failing to uphold the gridiron’s values of properly applied violence.

The Last Boy Scout — More than half a century on from 70,000 Witnesses, very little has changed. Another big football game is undone by the pressures of gambling and fatality on the field, only here a running back under pressure from outside forces turns a handgun on would-be tacklers, blowing them away before offing himself at the end zone. This happens as the “Los Angeles Stallions” play on “Friday Night Football,” a broadcast with an extremely blunt and funny parody of its real-life Monday counterpart’s opening (“Friday night’s a great night for football!” the singer blares, American flag in the background), and the near-lack of any exaggeration here implies the gunplay on the field is merely the concept of a blood sport carried to its logical conclusion. Shane Black’s screenplay doesn’t quite follow through with this, and now seems sweetly naive in how its villain is revealed to be trying to legalize gambling and must be stopped. Disgraced former quarterback Damon Wayans stops the plot and redeems himself by throwing a tight spiral to the face of a Congressman and thus knocking him out of the way of an assassin’s bullet, this of course takes place during the Stallions’ next contest. As in 70,000 Witnesses, bad football violence is successfully neutralized by good football violence (also, the bad guy is exploded to death), bodies may fall but the game goes on. The cycle continues just as night follows day, and every night is a great night for football.