PIGSKIN PARADE

REVIEWED - GRIDIRON GANG:PUBLIC information films detailing the documentation required for completion of US tax forms do not get released in this territory. Yet distributors insist on sending us inspirational dramas in which rugged coaches rehabilitate hooligans by teaching them to play games few cinemagoers east of Nantucket understand.

Take them away! We don't want Coach Carter round these parts. Get Hardball out of our sight. We know they are all based on moving true stories, but we're still not interested.

The latest cinematic pep-talk to travel badly - the celluloid is positively green with airsickness - finds The Rock encouraging the inmates of a juvenile detention centre to take up American football. Barely acknowledging the bellowing irony, he concludes that coming together in a mob, donning similar uniforms and bashing all hell out of another might offer his charges a route away from gangland violence.

In the opening minutes, director Phil Joanou offers us a bravura sequence that recalls similar explosions of violence in his earlier State of Grace and suggests that Gridiron Gang might exceed expectations. That depiction of a drive-by shooting is invested with terrifying random terror, but, sadly, it only serves show up the lazy reliance on slow motion and endless shots of spinning pigskin in the routine football sequences.

The Rock - consistently likeable, reliably wooden - is asked to do nothing that coaches Samuel Jackson and Billy Bob Thornton haven't done to their own players in other recent films from this unlovely genre. Things begin badly, but he refuses to allow the team to give up. Things get better for a while. Then there is a crisis that appears to spell disaster for the programme.

Happily, the citizens of Bedford Falls, previously not always appreciative of Jimmy Stewart, all come together to support the football team by refusing to withdraw their savings. Unless, that is, I am confusing this film with another, more Wonderful one.