I couldn’t ignore a movie that has a soccer ball on its DVD cover. But Game of Life actually has very little to do with soccer. The story follows 5 families whose 10 year old boys play on a recreational soccer team that keeps losing. But the families don’t interact with each other.
Writer-Director-Producer Joseph Mehri made a career of producing straight-to-DVD B-movies that used former B-list stars with recognizable names, sported titles that were confusingly similar to known blockbusters, and often leveraged other films’ stories.
This film, originally titled Oranges, was released in 2007 but didn’t make it into theaters and finally went to DVD in 2012. The story has been compared to the film Crash, and the cast includes Tom Sizemore, Tom Arnold, Heather Locklear, Beverly D’Angelo, and Marina Sirtis.
Some of the reviews portray this as a movie about family, but it has some gratuitous violence, racism is brought up in cursory fashion, and you get to stare down Heather Locklear’s cleavage a lot. My buddy remarked that the production values are similar to a higher end porn film. So I wouldn’t call this a family movie by any means.
The credited soccer coordinator was from AYSO, and all the soccer scenes are played at 2x speed. I suppose it is to emphasize that the soccer is superfluous to the families’ dramas. The stories are not bad, but some films should not be allowed to put a soccer ball on the cover.
This is Tom Sizemore’s second soccer film, the other being A Shot at Glory, which was actually really about soccer.
5 Soccer Movie Mom Rating = 5
Resources:
- Release Date: 2007-04-17 (Phoenix)
- Original title was Oranges
- IMDB
- Director: Joseph Merhi
- Stars: Tom Sizemore
- Watch the Trailer
