Home Turf: Movie Review

A cookie-cutter rom-com with no personality.

There is usually a maturity even if simplistic to most Hallmark romances, but that is nowhere to be found in their back-to-school / football-themed Home Turf. The movie, which I believe is supposed to be funny, features football players moving in with the uptight school’s president after their dorm floor is flooded. It falls to the handsome coach to smooth things over.		2025 Directed by: MacIain Nelson Screenplay by: Gregg Rossen, Brian Sawyer Starring: Nikki Deloach, Warren Christie
President Cassidy Miller (Nikki Deloach) is the no-nonsense academic, who can fix all problems, promotes the arts, and expects everyone else to compromise except for herself. Football Head Coach Logan (Warren Christie) is supposed to be her opposite, in that he’s messy, doesn’t control everything but gets Cassidy to compromise by getting the football team to move into her large, on-campus house. I am never a fan of romance trope where the romantic leads start as antagonistic assholes who hate each other. Cassidy is uncompromising and Logan is too easy-going and everything they do pisses each other off. It’s a lazy meet-cute and I have yet to see a movie that makes it well written. This movie is also not helped by the fact they have thrown every cliché imaginable onto the field. First, there’s the under-funded arts program vs the football that gets all the donor money. Then it takes an outsider recognizing that the boys are struggling in their personal lives and that’s why they’re losing on the football field. And to top it off, the add ballet to football practice to help with their footwork as if no movie has ever done that before. For the first half of the movie, the plot is how the football players are terrible roommates and the school president can’t stand living with them. I believe it’s supposed to be funny, but it’s so immature and uncreative that there are no laughs to be found. Things get better in the second half when the team recognizes that Cassidy and Logan are falling for each other so the players keep trying to get them together. That part is undeniably cute. The lead actors have solid chemistry together and do make a cute couple. Unfortunately the movie around them is so cookie-cutter and unoriginal with no personality. It’s doubtful a human even wrote this, but if they did, it was done with a clipboard and a marker checking off every single plot point that a computer or Hallmark analytics department told them to make.