‘The Mosquito Bowl’ Review: ‘Friday Night Lights’ Meets ‘Five Came Back’ in Peter Berg’s Formulaic Netflix Movie About a World War II Football Game — SkimNews
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- The Mosquito Bowl stages its central football sequence on Christmas Eve 1944, when college players are ordered to play two-hand touch on an Okinawa beach while their units prepare for battle; the game occupies eight minutes.
- Peter Berg renders the 126-minute film’s battlefield horror with visceral force, but the review finds its frightened recruits, sniper attacks and frenetic combat interchangeable with those in several dozen other World War II movies.
- Buzz Bissinger devoted only one page of his source book to the game, using it to examine the semi-forgotten men in that day’s lineup while the adaptation expands it into an anti-war story.
- Mark L. Smith and Berg convey that anti-war message chiefly by reducing collegiate legends to cannon fodder, leaving the bonds among the soldiers and their individual choices to enlist underdeveloped.
- Nicholas Galitzine plays Brown University legend John McLaughry, whom the review identifies as the only character certain to survive the assault on Japan.
- Ray Nicholson plays Purdue fullback Tony Butkovich, the only character said to have been heading to the pros before the war and the review’s choice as the film’s strongest central presence.
- Netflix schedules the theatrical release for Friday, October 30, and the streaming debut for Wednesday, November 25.
Why it matters: For Netflix, the October 30 theatrical opening and November 25 streaming debut put a 126-minute film before audiences. Its potent combat imagery and eight-minute football centerpiece offer a hook, but interchangeable characters and formulaic battlefield scenes leave the movie with little beyond violence.
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