Review: 'The Mosquito Bowl' churns war and football into an unexciting slog

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Set us as preferred A football game in the middle of a war sounds as high concept as movies get.And yet Peter Berg’s Netflix epic “The Mosquito Bowl” is based on a scrimmage that really happened in the Pacific theater during World War II, when two Marine regiments squared off on Guadalcanal Beach on Christmas Eve of 1944.

It wasn’t some amateur contest, either: Most of the players, in a curious fluke, were college stars with serious pro prospects.They’d just need to stay alive to realize those dreams.Berg, a full-tilt kind of director whose love of combat scenarios and gridiron drama has elsewhere yielded his best films, “Lone Survivor” and “Friday Night Lights,” was surely the guy to adapt this story, drawn from “Friday” author Buzz Bissinger’s 2022 book.

Except that in his admirable attempt to juxtapose a violent game against the hell of war, Berg has regrettably hewed to a standard playbook of tropes without sending fleshed-out characters onto the field.Which is too bad, because the real-life athletes-turned-soldiers he and co-screenwriter Mark L.Smith have built their movie around have been well-cast with quartet of ascendant stars.

Brooding hunk Nicholas Galitzine plays brainy, good-natured Brown graduate John McLaughry; Bill Skarsgård is wily-eyed Wisconsin Badger Bob Bauman; Tom Francis is All-American tight end Dave Schreiner, who can’t get over his school having lost to Purdue; and record-breaking fullback Ray Butkovich is played with grinning confidence by Ray Nicholson (maybe you know his dad).Movies From a new “Resident Evil” reboot from the director of “Weapons” to Oscar contenders starring Mikey Madison and Tom Cruise, here are the movies we’ll be at this fall.Introduced in muddy, crunchy scenes of big game highlights and raucous partying, the boys hear news of the attack o...