On M List of Movie Reviews
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Monday Night Mayhem (2002)
Rate:
7
Viewed:
9/21
9/21:
Monday Night Mayhem is an interesting backstory of the fractured relationships among who's who of televised sports
despite the show's tremendous success.
I knew who Howard Cosell was and never liked him. He was an arrogant, pompous, alcoholic, know-it-all wordsmith with a
boundless ego. Howard Cosell faded away into oblivion after being unceremoniously booted from the lineup and then fired for
good when he announced baseball games while drunk. Ironically, Al Michaels worked with him during an 1984 ALCS telecast and
called him out for it yet was arrested for DUI in 2013. How Howard Cosell died can be attributed to many reasons, but one is
the clearest: his excessive cigar-smoking habit.
Monday Night Football used to be a big thing back then. The show lost relevance when ESPN took over, turning it into a
football game that happened to be on Monday night. For a while, Sunday Night Football was actually
Monday Night Football in disguise, and then it slowly became a football game that happened to be on Sunday night. Sadly,
after John Madden retired, the quality of the announcers went from bad to awful to putrid so much that I would automatically
mute the TV.
Back to the film, the toughest part is making an adjustment from the real people to the actors pretending to be a
caricature version of them with John Turturro as the prime target. I'm not going to take anything away from his
performance because it's a fantastic job, but he's no Howard Cosell. Only the man himself could play Howard Cosell.
As for Don Meredith, he was actually a big, handsome-looking guy, but Brad Beyer doesn't fit the bill. Kevin Anderson
of Liebestraum is kind of close for Frank Gifford. John Heard is more developed as Roone Arledge who's primarily
responsible for making Monday Night Football as what it was, and he wanted only Joe Namath to begin with. The
guy who plays Chet Forte is John Turturro's brother Nicholas.
All in all, if the comparisons can be ignored, Monday Night Mayhem is a well-done movie that brings back memories.