
Little Giants
3.4
(3.2K)
Comedy
Family
1994
107 min
PG
When Danny O'Shea's daughter is cut from the Peewee football team just for being a girl, he decides to form his own team, composed of other ragtag players who were also cut. Can his team really learn enough to beat the elite team, coached by his brother, a former pro player?
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Comedy
Sports
Football
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"It's a profound injustice that [Little Giants](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/little_giants) (1994) has a 36% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes...based on 11 reviews. The user score is 63% (from more than 50,000 reviews) and (in my opinion) even that's way too low.
The movie deals with excluding people because of their gender or capabilities, with those who make the cut cruelly bullying those who didn't. Becky (aka Icebox, which has to be one of the coolest nicknames of any movie character) was head and shoulders better than any other player but excluded because of her gender (by her own damn uncle) shows up to defend her friends in her go-kart, chasing off the bullies on their bikes (and then running them down for good measure). They form a team and with any and all outcasts welcome. They don't give each other **** because they all know what it feels like to be excluded (when Jake, whose mother is understandably concerned about his safety, shows up wrapped in foam padding like the Michelin Man, the other kids all think it's cool).
John Madden and Emmett Smith show up halfway through! He provides guidance and helps build the team's confidence.
The movie doesn't have any villains, only antagonists who are doing what they think is best. Ed O'Neill truly believes that he's helping save these kids embarrassment by not letting them on the team. The players who did get picked understandably think they are superior to the kids that didn't get picked...because they just had their superiority confirmed by getting picked. Spike is a product of his environment...his dad literally raised him to play football. Spike's dad is the closest thing to a villain, as he encourages Spike to play dirty. Ed O'Neill shuts that **** down quick, telling them their out of here if they pull that **** again. After they lose, Spike comforts his father in what seems like a genuinely sweet gesture.
The best line in the movie?
"[That's no cheerleader, that's my niece, Becky and she's ******."](https://youtu.be/-wSwBl3HZvw)
In the end, they overcome by embracing what makes them different and playing to their strengths.
But you wouldn't know any of that **** based on Roger Ebert's review. He really dragged this movie, but reading what he wrote then now it really seems like he was ****** about a whole bunch of other things and took it all out on a movie that (in my opinion) really didn't deserve it.
>Just yesterday I was cleaning out the office and I threw away a paperback by Syd Field, the famous Hollywood screenplay coach. Field is the man who is largely responsible for that strange feeling you may have had lately, that every movie seems to be about the same. The characters, locations and gimmicks may change - but the story structure is right out of the book.
>Field teaches screenwriting workshops. The workshops don't seem able to teach you how to write like yourself, but they sure are able to teach you how to write like everyone else. At a time when Hollywood is bashful about originality, it's a real career asset to be able to write clone screenplays.
>Look at "Little Giants," written by James Ferguson, Robert Shallcross, Tommy Swerdlow and Michael Goldberg. What do you mean, it's one of the stupidest movies you've seen? It got sold, didn't it? And it got made, didn't it? So that makes it a success, doesn't it? It's mind-boggling to reflect that this screenplay actually involved work by four writers. It's such a small achievement, their division of labor must have resembled splitting the atom. I don't have any idea if Ferguson, Shallcross, Swerdlow and Goldberg have ever attended one of Field's workshops. Maybe they didn't need to.
>Working in two platoons, they have skillfully removed all vestiges of originality from this story, and turned in a perfectly-honed retread of every other movie about how a team of losers wins the big game.
>Oops! I gave away the ending! The plot stars Ed O'Neill and Rick Moranis as two brothers in the small town of Urbania, Ohio. O'Neill is a football hero and Heisman Trophy winner. Moranis is a nerd who runs a gas station. His daughter Becky (Shawna Waldron) is one of the best football players in town, but when O'Neill chooses a team for the Pop Warner League, he doesn't choose Becky, 'cause she's a girl.
>He also doesn't choose the fat kid, the skinny kid, the kid who drops every pass, etc.
>Moranis thinks it's unfair. So he decides to coach his own team - the Little Giants. At first they are utterly incompetent. Then John Madden and a bunch of pro stars (Emmitt Smith, Bruce Smith, Tim Brown and Steve Emtman) turn up in town after their bus gets lost. And they give the kids some quick lessons, turning them into only severely incompetent players.
>Comes the day for the big game between O'Neill's jocks and the Little Giants. The O'Neill team includes a mountainous kid named Spike, who speaks of himself in the third person, and whose father has the movie's only funny line: "Every night before he goes to bed I massage his hamstrings with evaporated milk." Spike of course is the instant enemy of Becky, who has despaired of playing football as a girl, and joined the cheerleading squad. But after the first half ends disastrously, she gets steamed, and runs out on the field wearing her helmet, shoulder pads, jersey - and, of course, cheerleader skirt.
>Little kids may like this movie, if they've never seen one like it before. Slightly older kids with good memories will notice that this is not even the first movie this year where a character passes gas to knock out the other team. Even older viewers are likely to bitterly resent the fate that drew them into the theater."
"This is my favorite movie. It always has been since I was 6 or 7 in 2013. I still watch it daily now, as a teen"
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Elise Cannon