For every sharp one-liner about a pampered college football team that's "so corrupt it could use its yearbook photos as mug shots," there's a brain-numbing plot development that's straight out of a desperate sitcom.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 24, 2014

The film itself is a genial, slight, entirely predictable football comedy, but it serves Bakula well.

| Jan 24, 2014

As they say in football, pass.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Jan 24, 2014

The shameless commercialism and hypocrisy of big-time college football is a target as inviting as a receiver wide open in the end zone. But the muddled huddle that is Necessary Roughness is one long fumble strewn with offensive lines.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 24, 2014

In the end, and from the viewpoint of a country where polytechnics can barely afford books, it's hard not to identify with the dean who resents all the time and energy wasted on football in his supposed institute of learning.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 24, 2014

An amiable comedy.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 24, 2014

This gridiron comedy piles up cliches the way Notre Dame racks up yardage, with an option-variety screenplay that promiscuously pitches the story in multiple directions.

| Mar 26, 2009

Cue endless football montages, interspersed with a load of drivel about finding fulfilment, making real friends, and rediscovering the joys of pure sporting endeavour.

| Jan 26, 2006

If the movie were a farcical free-for-all ridiculing the hyper-competitive world of college football, it might be amusing. But it can never decide whether to be an athletic answer to National Lampoon's Animal House or icky-inspirational like Rocky.

Full Review | May 20, 2003

You've seen this one before and you'll see this one again -- an innocuous sports comedy about a team of losers who have to pull together to become a successful squad.

| Original Score: 1.5/5 | Jan 1, 2000

The movie doesn't try to pump itself up into more than it is, a good-humored entertainment.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 1, 2000

An infectious albeit formulaic game of Cinderella football, this happy athletic romp seems to know just how wheezy it is, but the team grunts "hut, hut," and puts it right on the numbers anyway.

| Jan 1, 2000

Avoid it because it's the sort of soporific clich-fest in which every player gets exactly one measly trait, and the suspense about who's going to win the big game registers at absolute zero.

| Original Score: D | Sep 27, 1991