Last Time Out

University football star Danny Dolan (Christopher Conrad) seems destined for gridiron greatness, but extracurricular drinks and drugs are gaining yardage in his personal life. Mother Becky (Gail Strickland) sees all the signs that led Danny's booze-sodden father to abandon his family and college career. Now dried out, Joe Dolan (Michael Beck) is a successful businessman and is dismayed to see his long-estranged son on the same downward path. So Mr. Dolan decides on a rather extreme form of male bonding; he re-enrolls in college to complete his degree and, at age 38, joins the football team again to keep close to the boy. Suitably embarrassed, Danny learns from his mom of the alcohol-assisted car crash in which teenaged Joe decimated his family, and taunts his father about it. A few clunking scenes later, though, the kid's got a tragedy all his own when best buddy Mark (Corby Timbrook) fatally falls as they're drunkenly climbing the stadium's press tower. Shattered, Danny's useless to the team, until he gets his nerve back in The Big Game, when the coach allows father and son on the field simultaneously as co-quarterbacks (one is number 81, the other 18) to score the winning point.

Though the climax sounds like something out of the Marx Brothers' HORSEFEATHERS, fine actors play it straight and manage, by inches, to survive dialogue like "It's funny how you put the past behind you--and there it is, staring you in the face." But characters are unsalvageably trite and one-note. Danny has no personality whatever when he isn't sloshed or hating his dad, while Joe's placid serenity in the face of life's vicissitudes suggests not sobriety but sedation. Locker-room language, at least, is realistic; but for that and some sex LAST TIME OUT could have been an even older, preachy network TV feature. (Substance abuse, sex, profanity, adult situations.) leave a comment