Dodge Connolly (George Clooney, center) leads the huddle in a scene from Leatherheads.

SPF / Melinda Sue Gordon

Leatherheads, which revolves around the early days of professional football in 1925, patterns itself after the wacky, classic romantic screwball comedies that were so snappily popular in the 1930s — The Front Page and Bringing Up Baby being its prototypes — or maybe the Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedies of the early ’60s.

But Leatherheads only works in fits and starts. The direction by star George Clooney is too lethargic to build much momentum on the football side of the equation. The Big Game at the end of the film seems tacked on and extends the film another 20 minutes beyond the point where it seems to have been over, although the clever switcheroo punch line counts for something.

But the romantic triangle between Renée Zellweger, Clooney and John Krasinski (of TV’s The Office) never catches fire in any direction. Zellweger and Clooney bicker and hiss at each other like Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant in The Front Page, or Doris Day and Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk, but the inevitable romance that will eventually follow lacks urgency this time around.

The script by Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly apes The Front Page, with a subplot about hard-boiled Chicago Tribune news hen Lexie Littleton (Zellweger) out to make a name for herself by exposing an idolized star football player Carter Rutherford (Krasinski) as a fraud. Carter’s nationally ballyhooed war hero stories, about how he captured a platoon of the Kaiser’s soldiers in the trenches of France during World War I, may have been embellished and burnished to bear little resemblance to what really happened. (We get to see what really happened in a sepia-toned flashback sequence that’s haplessly amusing.)

In fact, the overall tone of Leatherheads, whose title refers to the leather helmets early football players wore, is light and pleasant. The back-and-forth bickering between chipmunk-cheeked Zellweger and Clooney is almost as snappy and biting as the stuff in The Front Page. (I’d like to see Zellweger teamed with Richard Gere in a movie, however, where they could puff up their cheeks and squinch their little eyes at each other.)

When the film opens, the Duluth Bulldogs are on the ropes, bankrupted by a lack of fans and local interest in their rowdy, free-for-all games. Star player Dodge Connolly (Clooney) finds himself out of a job at age 45 and no skills to fall back on. But he does have a dream: Recruit national war hero/football hero Carter Rutherford, who is currently playing college ball for Princeton, as the foundation of a new pro football league.

Unfortunately for Dodge — whose name seems perfect for he’s as much a con man as an over-the-hill football player — Lexie is on the sidelines trying to worm her way into the good graces of the naïve Carter to dig up some dirt on him. Unfortunately also for Dodge, he finds that all that bickering that’s been going on between him and Lexie has made her very attractive to him.

Unfortunately for the audience, there’s not a lot of passion on behalf of any of the three. Although Lexie eventually grows to like Carter and feels protective of him, there is after all that big career-making story for her. While their story is being played out, Dodge finds himself on the sidelines.

Jonathan Pryce turns up as Carter’s shadowy, slightly creepy agent, adding an odd touch to the story. Peter Gerety, once a mainstay at Trinity Rep, gets to harrumph a lot as the no-nonsense new football commissioner who institutes a batch of new rules and wants to ban Dodge’s brand of brawling football.

So there’s a lot to chew on in Leatherheads. And yet it all seems pretty inconsequential. Still, there’s room for two “sting operation” punch line moments geared to shake things up in the end. A little more romance and livelier pacing would have done wonders.

***Leatherheads

Starring: George Clooney, Renee Zellweger, John Krasinski, Jonathan Pryce, Stephen Root, Peter Gerety.

Rated: PG-13, contains profanity, violence, adult themes.

mjanuson@projo.com