{"id":660925,"date":"2026-10-29T19:26:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-29T19:26:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/660925\/"},"modified":"2026-10-29T19:26:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-29T19:26:08","slug":"the-mosquito-bowl-review-netflix-mixes-football-war-and-cliches-in-slick-by-the-numbers-saga-war-films","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/660925\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mosquito Bowl review \u2013 Netflix mixes football, war and cliches in slick by-the-numbers saga | War films"},"content":{"rendered":"

Forgive me, but it is difficult to not to be a little cynical about The Mosquito Bowl, Peter Berg\u2019s grimly serious action feature situated (and marketed during many an NFL game) at the intersection of two predominant male interests: football and the second world war. Though both are certainly rich topics for cinema, and though I have been a fan of many a football\/war story \u2013 most especially Berg\u2019s NBC series Friday Night Lights<\/a> \u2013 it is, let\u2019s say, a tricky time for movies filled with dubiously nostalgic patriotism and masculinity. The trailer practically drips with a borderline parodic virility: a cadre of handsome up-and-coming male actors streaked with dirt; a group of men \u201ctrained for glory\u201d and \u201ccalled to war\u201d, triumphantly hoisting aloft footballs, beer and guns to ponderous music.<\/p>\n

But Berg is a capable and battle-tested director who knows his way around both a clock-ticking thriller (Deepwater Horizon<\/a>, Lone Survivor<\/a>) and the football field. So while The Mosquito Bowl, adapted for Netflix<\/a> by Berg and Mark L Smith from a nonfiction book<\/a> by Buzz Bissinger, fulfills its promise of American male pablum \u2013 there is many a clunky monologue about honor and duty and the \u201cwhite buzz\u201d of adrenaline \u2013 it also delivers on competently made, absorbing action sequences. (In huge news for Friday Night Lights fans, the football scenes here are once again scored by Explosions in the Sky.) Both in sport and in war, Berg has a knack for grace within visual cacophony and chaos; graphic sequences in battle and from the 1944 Christmas Eve pickup game at Guadalcanal that gives the film its name suggest, far more than its anvil-heavy dialogue, the connections between the gridiron and the battlefield, how the fleetness and camaraderie of sport can be wielded for survival and killing. There is a stomach-churning catharsis in experiencing, as in Sam Mendes\u2019s 1917<\/a> or Alex Garland\u2019s Warfare<\/a>, the real-time brutality and capriciousness of war.<\/p>\n

That is, if you can stomach the rest of it. Every sepia-toned off-field scene, with the boys being boys or with their token supportive girlfriends, is liable to prompt an eye roll, such as when the Wisconsin Badger Bob Baumann (Bill Skarsg\u00e5rd) quotes Jack London\u2019s The Call of the Wild from memory. Or when a shirtless Anthony \u201cTouchdown Tony\u201d Butkovich (Ray Nicholson, who inherited his father\u2019s wild eyes but less of the magnetism), proclaims that \u201cNew York City\u2019s the biggest goddamn bull I known of, and I intend to ride the hell out of it\u201d in a sweaty locker room. Or when John \u201cMac\u201d McLaughry (Nicholas Galitzine) waxes poetic about how playing football \u201cfeels like magic\u201d in a romantic bathtub scene with his girlfriend (Ella Newton) \u2013 who, of course, can only compare such flow-state nirvana to the feeling she gets when she has sex with him. Or when Dave Schreiner (Jeremy Allen White lookalike Tom Francis), the most grounded of this quartet, simmers when confronted by a college rival at marines registration.<\/p>\n

These are scant character details for a real group of college football stars who traded professional glory for the US marines and the Pacific Theater after the attack on Pearl Harbor (relayed, as in several other historic sequences, by a scattershot montage of archival footage). But The Mosquito Bowl doesn\u2019t have much more to say than that about its central quartet: they love football, their girlfriends and their country. They have bigger dreams but naively head to war anyway. The cliche of careless, precious youth about to be squandered \u2013 gestured by an impromptu football game in the snow \u2013 is rote, if still baseline moving, because obviously no 24-year-old brimming with life should die. (And you know that some of our strapping boys will.)<\/p>\n

And for what? From basic training, to Tarawa, to camp at Guadalcanal, to the deadly assault at Okinawa<\/a>, sergeants and soldiers offer their own blunt reasons to fight the Japanese, most laced with racism toward Asian people that ranges from casual to menacing (our heroes, at least, are violently put off by fellow marines hawking \u201cJap teeth\u201d). One could argue \u2013 I have to assume, given that the film ends with a title card acknowledging not only the Japanese civilians slain at Okinawa but the 75m global deaths from the entire conflict, that the film-makers would argue \u2013 that such inclusion is merely period accuracy, a way to represent how US soldiers rationalize their role. But it\u2019s hard to separate what is merely telling the story as these marines experienced it \u2013 the Japanese a faceless, mystifying \u201cother\u201d prone to murder-suicide \u2013 and what is American propaganda. The elegiac music for US victories, the planting of American flags and the prolonged, gut-twisting sequences of marine suffering and death, sit uneasily with the unnamed anguish of the many Japanese, solider and civilian.<\/p>\n

As with every war movie, there are a thousand possibly better or more challenging war movies existing at the margins of this one. But this one, firmly for the marines, is what we got. Berg at times cuts to a wide shot of the Earth, the whizzing of bullets giving way to the silence of space, in a ham-fisted suggestion of war\u2019s futility. It\u2019s of little comfort, when the heat of battle is the reason to watch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Forgive me, but it is difficult to not to be a little cynical about The Mosquito Bowl, Peter…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":660926,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[146,85,46,397],"class_list":["post-660925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660925","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=660925"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660925\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/660926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=660925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=660925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=660925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}