Skip to content
THE COLLECTION / 2005
Hard to recommend · proposed 95 min

Kicking & Screaming (2005)

A collection of tepid bits, with a soccer match occasionally breaking out.

Directed by Jesse Dylan · Written by Leo Benvenuti and Steve Rudnick · Approximately 95 minutes
Starring: Will Ferrell · Robert Duvall · Mike Ditka · Kate Walsh

Owner-informed draft. Built from the Letterboxd note dated 10 January 2026, with source checks and provisional expanded analysis. Verdict and advisories remain proposals.

A bad comedy can at least leave you with something to talk about. Kicking & Screaming mostly leaves the mild embarrassment of having occasionally chuckled at how wack the jokes were. I called it “a collection of tepid bits,” and that remains the useful diagnosis. The problem is the temperature.

Will Ferrell plays Phil Weston, a father who takes over his son's struggling soccer team and becomes consumed by competition with his own father. The studio record confirms the 2005 family comedy, its director and its approximately 95-minute running time. This is the soccer film, distinct from Noah Baumbach's 1995 film with a similar title.

Before you watch

Parental belittling and adults putting competitive pressure on children are part of the comedy. There is mild crude humour and language. The studio's PG content description supports the general family-comedy advisory; the story account corroborates the treatment of the children.

The premise has more energy than the jokes

There is a workable idea in a man reproducing the behaviour he hated in his own father. Coaching gives Phil a miniature kingdom, and winning offers a way to make his childhood grievance look like a present-day achievement. The children become participants in an argument that was never really theirs.

Ferrell is an obvious fit for a grown man who can turn an ordinary disappointment into a spectacular loss of perspective. Duvall supplies the harder competitive authority. The pairing ought to give the individual bits somewhere to build: one man is frightened of becoming the other while increasingly behaving just like him.

The film keeps finding occasions for obnoxiousness more readily than it finds fresh comic developments. The escalating coffee dependence is an especially clear example. A louder, more overbearing Phil is a change in volume; it is not automatically a more surprising joke.

A collection is not quite a comic rhythm

Mike Ditka's involvement adds a recognisable personality and another adversarial relationship. It also contributes to the feeling of separate attractions being placed beside one another. An appearance, a burst of bad behaviour, a sporting difficulty: the pieces are available, but their accumulation does not produce much momentum.

The underdog-sports structure supplies the expected route. That familiarity would be perfectly tolerable if the comic exchanges had more force. A conventional story can carry excellent jokes. Here it often feels as though the story and the bits are each waiting for the other to make the evening worthwhile.

My least dignified comparison is still the most accurate expression of the aftertaste: a shart, a quick wipe and a shrug of shame. Crude, certainly. Also rather more memorable than most of what provoked it.

The children need more than a lesson for Dad

The film understands that adults can make youth sports miserable. Its eventual correction depends on recognising that Phil has been treating his son as an extension of his own contest with Buck.

That is a decent destination, but it does not rescue the time spent getting there. Requiring a character to learn an obvious lesson is not enough to make his earlier behaviour funny. The children also receive less individual attention than the adults' competitive machinery, which weakens the emotional alternative the story eventually asks us to prefer.

Corny DNA

The sports-movie sentiment and broad behaviour are deliberate. Occasional laughter at a weak joke does not add up to a persuasive so-bad-it-is-good recommendation. The dominant impression was forgettability. All numerical axes remain unscored.

Verdict

Hard to recommend — proposed. An occasional chuckle is too little return for a comedy that largely feels like tepid bits arranged around an underdog template. Ferrell and Duvall provide a plausible comic pairing, but the film does not make enough of it. The promising pairing never supplies enough warmth or surprise to make the routine worth revisiting.

Spoilers from here

Reveal the ending and detailed analysis

The team wins after the father learns the lesson

Phil recognises how he has treated Sam, changes his approach and leads the Tigers to a championship win. Buck and Phil reconcile. The scene account corroborates that resolution.

The outcome restores the children to the story's stated priorities, but the championship still provides a rather convenient reward for the adult's improved attitude. Winning and learning to stop making everything about winning arrive together. The film can announce the better principle without taking much risk with the conventional sports payoff.

That is a small structural reservation beside the larger comic one: an expected ending might have been satisfying if the journey had supplied enough laughter. It does not retroactively warm up the bits.

Sources

The expanded analysis is proposed wording for the owner, not a claim of another viewing.