Never Seen It, #133 of 200: The Program

Alright boys. Let's put the women and children to bed and go lookin' for dinner! If dinner is 200 movies I've never seen before! Let's go! Let's go!

The Program

1993

David S. Ward

The first thing I'm going to ask you to do is to look at the cast list. Look for actor Craig Sheffer. Know that Sheffer plays the team's quarterback. He is important to this movie. Now look at his name. Assuming that you are here on this blog reading this blog post because you know me and not because, I don't know, you're lost or something, then you can see why the name of the quarterback on the football team featured in The Program would be concerning to me. Yes: concerning.

It's surreal and at least a little off-putting to hear your name repeated multiple times in a major motion picture film. (Yeah, of course it's spelled wrong, but saying it out loud in a movie made it indistinguishable.) That's the reason I'm here, after all. I was at least tangentially aware that there was a sports movie out there in which the quarterback was named that particular name. And I figured that because of that, it was my duty to watch it. So I watched it. Call me a sadist.

Bad movie, by the way. Bad. Not the worst one I've ever seen, but definitely bad. I guess this shouldn't have been surprising from the get-go—we last saw the work of director David S. Ward when we watched Major League, which was a good movie, but only because it was fun and pretty funny on purpose. The Program commits the venial sin of trying to be serious, and accidentally ending up being funny away. The bad parts of Major League were bad because they tried to be serious. Ward dares to dream: what if we did a sports movie that tried to be serious for two hours straight? And failed at it?

The underlying notion that the NCAA is corrupt as shit and uses college kids like cattle maybe feels a little "old news" 30 years later. That's the extent of the sympathy-building that The Program does, however, so if you're not shocked by the fact that there is immense pressure placed on college athletes to win so that the school makes money, then what you're left with is a bunch of obnoxious assholes who feel the need to be the worst human beings on earth in order to win. A thought occurred to me with fifteen minutes left to go (and seconds left at the end of the pivotal championship game): if they win this, then The Program was a terrible movie. I think you know what happens next.

Tonal whiplash abound. Take defensive lineman Lattimer. He's 'roided up, and so excited that he made the team that he bashes his head through multiple windshields (tone: unintentionally funny!). Later, the 'roids cause him to act out, which leads to him almost raping a coed (tone: pretty dark!). Then, the game ends with Lattimer crying because... I guess the long stare that coach James Caan gave him when coach knew he was still 'roiding made Lattimer feel like a failure (tone: unearned attempt at sympathy)??

Every sport movie cliché is thrown at the wall, and it's just way to cluttered and underbaked. The star player gets a career-ending injury and sinks into depression! The quarterback just wants his daddy to love him, but daddy's a drunk and doesn't show up at the big game! Coach is forced to break his own code of ethics to keep the boosters happy! The freshman gets the girl in the end! And so on, and so on. These are all presented one-dimensionally. Some plot lines are dropped completely. Others never get started (thought for sure that the QB having "a headache" was going to lead to other concussion symptoms, but I guess that was a feint?). I got burned when I made a similar argument with Predator (see the comments), but I can't possibly imagine that anyone is going to claim that The Program is in on the joke in the same way.

The quarterback, whose name I will continue to avoid typing for the rest of this blog post, was the worst of them all. Besides Craig Sheffer playing a college junior at age 33, and besides the fact that Craig Sheffer at 33 looked like he was actually 55, I'd say that QB was the creepiest and least sympathetic character of them all. Equal parts cocky and suicidally morose, the sight of him hitting on a woman was just uncomfortable. He's consistently an asshole to this poor woman (played by Kristy Swanson), believing that he'll get the girl just because he's a Heisman candidate. Unfortunately, the film proves him right. Proves the whole team right, honestly. The pressure is horrible and leads them to do unspeakably bad things, but hey, they won the big game AND got the girl! Woohoo!

Still, I take particular offense to the actions of the quarterback, because his name is repeated over and over, and I can't help but feel like if you're going to have that name, then you have to, I don't know, be more responsible with it? Your name is repeated on national television! And you want it repeated in the context of you assaulting some asshole at a bar? You're better than that! You have a good name! Don't fuck this up! This is the most subjective thing I have ever typed in this blog column, so I'm sorry. There is literally no one else reading this that feels the same way (assuming my dad and great uncle and cousin-once-removed are not PoYB readers). But this is why I am here, and this is the problem I have with the film.

And yet, here's where it gets interesting too. It's a bad movie, no one is denying that. And it features a character with a very specific name. A name that, if the movie was any better or any more popular, might become a well-known name, instantly associated with a creepy 50-year-old-looking motherfucker whose substance abuse problems are magically solved with a mid-game pep talk from coach. It was a bad movie, and for that, I am eternally grateful.

It's a bad movie and not a particularly well-known movie. Most people have never heard of it. Years ago, my old boss at the Laf was the one that put me onto its existence, when he tried quoting the movie at me, assuming that I knew, because of the name (thinking about this, plus the Pearl and the Redeemers thing, is probably the reason why I had my first Laf dream in forever last night). And it's not like I've mentioned it to that many people (I try not to make it a habit of mentioning movies I've never seen before... gotta save that for the blog), but the few people I have told "hey, did you know there is a football movie in which the QB has this name?" have reacted with blank stares. No one has ever heard of this thing. Which is weird, I guess. Halle Berry is in this film! James Caan was in The Godfather! Omar Epps is pretty big, maybe!(?) And yet it was a bad film from the '90s, forgettable even, and so people forgot.

This is a good thing! Thank fucking god!! Can you imagine how shitty my life would be if this movie blew up in any significant way? Imagine that instead of making $23 million against a $20 million budget, it actually made $823 million? Imagine if The Program won the Oscar for Best Picture that year? Imagine if children in every home in America knew the name of the quarterback in the most popular football film of all time, as portrayed by Craig Sheffer? Imagine if that's what people thought of when they met me? I'm horrified even just hypothesizing about it, honestly.

So this is probably the first time I am actively thankful that I just watched a bad movie. Not only was it bad in a kind of fun way, but the fact that it was bad in 1993 actually made my life better, in retrospect. The past three decades have been just a little bit more enjoyable simply due to the fact that The Program was a bad movie and it was largely forgotten. Starting today, and every day henceforth, I will try to remember The Program, and also try to make sure that I'm the only one who remembers The Program.

I know this was somewhat of vague blog post, but that was by design. I needed to be coy regarding what the quarterback's name was and why that was important to me. If you saw the character list and weren't able to connect the dots, then I say: hey, thanks for being here, stranger. Welcome to Puke on Your Birthday.

If it wasn't for the quarterback's name, I'm not sure I would've known what to type about today, besides the fact that The Program kinda sucked. Did you know that the QB had a drinking problem? And that he won the big game, and the drinking problem went away? And that he proved it by presenting his new girlfriend at the end of the film with a SIX-PACK OF SPRITE?! I guess I would've written about substance abuse, if the name of the quarterback with the Sprite wasn't coincidentally what it ended up being. Actually...... was the secret theme of The Program that of addiction, and how addiction to success can be tangled up with other addictions, like alcohol or steroids or sex? Does "the program" have a duel meaning, both literally the football program whose existence hangs in the balance of this group of children and also figuratively "the program," a.k.a. Alcoholics Anonymous?!

Damn, that would've been a cool trail to travel down. Shame they had to give QB that goddamn fucking name.

GRADE: 1.5 pukes out of 5

NEXT TIME: So they are saying that there's more to Psycho than the shower scene. Neato.