{"id":101616,"date":"2025-10-03T19:06:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-03T19:06:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/101616\/"},"modified":"2025-10-03T19:06:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T19:06:11","slug":"pat-stacey-if-youre-going-to-steal-from-one-of-the-best-loved-family-films-of-all-time-youd-better-back-it-up-chad-powers-does-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/101616\/","title":{"rendered":"Pat Stacey: If you\u2019re going to steal from one of the best-loved family films of all time you\u2019d better back it up \u2013 \u2018Chad Powers\u2019 does not"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nThe new Disney+ comedy Chad Powers apes the likes of \u2018Ted Lasso\u2019 and \u2018Mrs Doubtfire\u2019 but doesn\u2019t come within a football field\u2019s length of being as good as either of them\n<\/p>\n

Like the first of those, it\u2019s essentially a sports underdog-slash-redemption story. Like the second, it relies on its central character disguising himself with prosthetics.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t come within a football field\u2019s length of being as good as either of them \u2013 and that\u2019s from someone who\u2019s always found Ted Lasso distinctly underwhelming.<\/p>\n

Its co-creator and lead is Glen Powell, who, for reasons not apparent, is being hailed as the next great movie star. Then again, we live in a world where Mark Wahlberg was once Hollywood\u2019s highest-paid actor, so there\u2019s no accounting for taste.<\/p>\n

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Powell is Russ Holliday, an arrogant, narcissistic college football quarterback whose career implodes overnight. First, he fumbles an easy touchdown, dropping the ball before he\u2019s reached the endzone and losing his team the Rose Bowl in the dying seconds.<\/p>\n

Then he makes things 100 times worse by punching the father of a young fan, a cancer-stricken boy in a wheelchair.<\/p>\n

Eight years later, Russ is all washed up. He\u2019s back living with and working for his dad Mike (Toby Huss), a Hollywood make-up wizard.<\/p>\n

\n

He\u2019s still obnoxious and insufferable. In a word, a jerk<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He spends his evenings roaring around nightspots with his \u201cbros\u201d in a monstrous Tesla Cybertruck, blathering on about cryptocurrency, hitting on young women who don\u2019t want to be hit on and spouting conspiracy theory crap (Princess Diana was murdered, Osama Bin Laden is still alive).<\/p>\n

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Failure has taught Russ nothing. He\u2019s still obnoxious and insufferable. In a word, a jerk \u2013 or in a different word that people keep throwing at him, a \u201cdick\u201d. Nonetheless, his manager has somehow secured him a contract with a minor league team, giving him a way back into the game.<\/p>\n

The contract is immediately withdrawn when the news that the boy whose dad he punched has died hits social media, reminding people of Russ\u2019s disgrace and turning him into an even more hated figure than he was before.<\/p>\n

\"Glen<\/p>\n

Glen Powell and Frankie A. Rodriguez in ‘Chad Powers’. Photo: Disney+<\/p>\n

While delivering some of his father\u2019s prosthetics for the latest Michael Bay movie to the studio, Russ learns a struggling college team called the South Georgia Catfish has lost its quarterback and is having open try-outs for a new one.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s stuck at traffic lights when, as if by magic, his gaze lands on a huge poster for Mrs Doubtfire on the studio wall. He has a lightbulb moment: he\u2019ll take his father\u2019s prosthetics \u2013 a fake nose, chubby, rabbit-like cheeks, false teeth and a ratty-looking wig \u2013 head to Georgia and pass himself off as a hitherto undiscovered talent.<\/p>\n

The Catfish mascot, a gay teenager called Danny (Frankie A. Rodriguez) with a talent for make-up \u2013 you know, like all gay teenagers on TV have \u2013 discovers Russ\u2019s secret early on and helps him transform into Chad Powers, a mumbling, shaggy-haired hillbilly of murky origin with a drawling accent that quickly becomes grating.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re going to brazenly steal from one of the best-loved family films of all time \u2013 and brazenly let the audience know you\u2019re stealing from it \u2013 you\u2019d better be prepared to back it up with something very special.<\/p>\n

Chad Powers doesn\u2019t. Leaving aside the fact that no one notices how much Chad resembles Russ (the eyes are a giveaway), the on-the-spot fabrications he comes up with about why nobody in the game has ever heard of him before and not a single second of him playing football exists online are too daft to be even faintly credible.<\/p>\n

When someone remarks on why he looks so old, he tells them it\u2019s because of Covid.<\/p>\n

Ted Lasso, for all its shortcomings, was at least warm-hearted. Chad Powers, featuring a character who\u2019s no more likeable with the prosthetics than without them, is curiously cold and uninvolving.<\/p>\n

The humour is flat and undercooked (nobody seems to have thought beyond the basic gimmick) and the series tends toward the mean-spirited.<\/p>\n

It depends heavily on Chad trying to avoid water, which will cause the prosthetics to peel off.<\/p>\n

With the exception of Steve Zahn as the Catfish coach, all the supporting characters, including a glamorous blonde team owner (Wynn Everett) lifted straight from Ted Lasso, are cardboard cutouts. Whether playing Russ or Russ playing Chad, Powell is equally charmless.<\/p>\n

Rating: Two stars<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The new Disney+ comedy Chad Powers apes the likes of \u2018Ted Lasso\u2019 and \u2018Mrs Doubtfire\u2019 but doesn\u2019t come…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":101617,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[263],"tags":[18,117,19,17,327,9162],"class_list":{"0":"post-101616","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-pat-stacey"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101616\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}