Gridiron Gang A Movie Review	MPAA Rated - PG-13 It's 2:00 Long A Review by The Dude on the Right

The Rock plays Sean Porter (I’m going to call him The Rock from now on, instead of Dwayne Johnson, because I read that he got the name right’s back from Vince McMahon, but I’m sorry, I digress). In any case, at Camp Kilpatrick, a juvenile center in California, it’s mostly filled with gang members, or just all-around bad dudes who have lost direction, and Sean begins to see that as much as he tries to rehabilitate them the status-quo way, for the most part once the kids get back on the street they either die, end up back at juvie, or end up in the big pokey because they aren’t teens anymore. He and his other "Camp Counselor," Malcolm (Xzibit), decide that what these kids really need is learning, like football-team learning, and so we get introduced to a bunch of the dudes at the Camp for a variety of reasons. At the top of the list for reforming, at least in the eye of Sean, is Willie Weathers (Jade Yorker), and so Sean gets boys at the camp to actually join the team, then Sean figures out a way to get the team into an actual football league in the area, and then Sean actually gets the kids to learn how to win, how to lose, and how to be better people so that they don’t end up being back on the streets as losers, on a path to die.

The story is simple in its direction, taking a bunch of troubled teens on the path to ruin and changing their stories into lives of being productive, but I will give you this, "Gridiron Gang" doesn’t sugar-coat the worlds these teens come from, nor how they end up at Camp Kilpatrick. Sadly, most of it deals with the land of gangs and guns, and for some of Sean Porter’s players, some of them do go back to the ways of gangs and guns, but the uplifting side of the movie is that for a better majority had there not been a football team, they see a different side of life, that life might be better lived than on a road of turmoil.

The thing that really works in this movie is that it is cast nearly perfectly, starting with The Rock as Sean Porter. All he wants to do is maybe save one kid from ending up back on the bad path, and he found a way to help many more. The Rock comes off great as the man who needs to be a hard-ass, then learns for himself that at times these kids are just kids, and even though they might be at the Camp for shooting someone, they still need to be treated like a kid, because that is the only way they will learn. Those cast for the football team are great, the Camp superiors, Paul (Leon Rippy) and Ted (Kevin Dunn), are fantastic as going from totally skeptical to totally seeing that Sean Porter is making a difference, and even the sad, mother dying storyline sort of worked.

And yet, as much as I was liking "Gridiron Gang," I thought it was really, for whatever reason, about 15 to 20 minutes too long. Some scenes dragged a bit, especially some of the football game scenes, and the film folks seemed to try to get too "slow-motion" dramatic because that is what they thought the football scenes should look like. Look, we get it, it’s a football game, just show it.

Anyway, the story is a great one, but I don’t think it warrants a full-price ticket, even if The Rock is great in his role. It’s 3 ½ stars out of 5 for "Gridiron Gang" from me, and I would highly recommend it for a matinee or a solid DVD rental.

That’s it for this one! I’m The Dude on the Right!! L8R!!!