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This week, America’s Lumpiest CEO Vince McMahon announced he had looked at the XFL, which only exists as a faded joke emblematic of absurd early twenty-first century boondoggle sporting ventures along with Slamball, the second version of American Gladiators, and the various celebrity boxings and human vs. bear hotdog eating competitions, and decided it needed to return. The XFL comes at a time when the NFL’s bulletproof reputation has faded as it has been smothered by a tapestry of incongruous grievances: people horrified by the league's grotesque cover-up of its devastating concussion problem, people bored by nine-hour games mired in replay review that have turned football into the part of a board game where you scrutinize the inside of the box for rules infractions, the people who have threatened boycotts over the NFL because they have conflated symbolic player protests over police brutality with a charge that the sports league that regularly holds Soviet-style tank parades before games is no longer imbued with enough theatrical patriotism, and relentlessly aggrieved Patriots fans.
Vince McMahon hopes to fill this void by reviving the XFL nearly 20 years on, precisely long enough to hope that everyone has forgotten that it was so dumb.
The XFL operated from an organizational philosophy
that the coolest shit in the world was flames and the
Boo Berry font
The XFL's original incarnation in 2001 promised a version of football that doubled down on brutality, prurience, and the exciting drama one could expect from the world of professional wrestling where oiled pectoral men screamed at each other and McMahon regularly pretended to die by getting trapped in various exploding limousines. Off the top of my head, I can still recall the XFL's selling points: an end to the fair catch rule and replacement of the opening kickoff with some sort of violently lawless football scramble; even as ESPN included its "Jack'd Up" segments to celebrate the infliction of brain traumas, the XFL offered viewers the opportunity to see players jacked to heretofore unimagined altitudes.
The XFL emerged as the wheezing death rattle to the 1990s trend of "extreme" advertising, where all products aimed at teenagers and children emanated from the fever dreams of a 57-year-old marketing executive who fell into some sort of cocaine reverie in front of a BMX bike shop in 1992 and spent the rest of the decade screaming at people to put more Xs and Zs in names and throwing terrified subordinates through windows then yelling WHY DOESN'T THIS HAVE A FUCKING SKATEBOARD? For the XFL, this meant making sure all teams had edgy, vaguely violent names that, viewed in 2018, all look exactly like a Korn logo ineptly stenciled onto an Algebra II textbook.
"The team's name and logo were designed to lead the team's
fans into
calling the team "The Ax", a shortened form of the
word "maniacs".
Regardless, the name and logo were roundly
criticized by advocates for
the rights of the mentally ill,[who?]
believing they were derived from a derisive term for a person
suffering from mental illness,
"maniac", and/or a depiction of a
deranged axe-wielding murderer,
though no picture of an axe
was in the logo. Still, many of the fans
formed their own cheering
section at the Liberty Bowl unofficially known
as 'The Asylum'"
(I already don't have to tell you this is from Wikipedia)
Part of McMahon's plan involved inserting wrestling personalities into the broadcast. That is how viewers wound up with football games called by Jesse "The Body" Ventura, a supernatural antenna for the late twentieth century's goofiest shit: professional wrestling, Arnold movies, the XFL, stolen valor accusations, third-party politics.
The XFL made it one season and folded, a disaster for pretty much everyone involved except for Tommy Maddox. Its gimmicks failed to hold anyone's attention past the opening weeks, and McMahon and NBC were left with a league full of also-ran players that no one wanted to see. Its sole influence comes from some camera angles and the fact that a guy put the words "He Hate Me" on the back of his jersey and briefly became a minor cultural phenomenon solely for that reason. I would venture to guess that anyone who has lingering warm feelings for the XFL regards it as kitsch, a dumb totem from a spectacularly dumb moment in American culture, something that is inherently funny because it actually existed.
I think that whatever ironic nostalgic for the XFL exists concerns an imagined XFL, the XFL promised. Not the sad reality of NFL Europe washouts humming dumpoff passes into running backs' ankles, but the idea of a professional sports league run not by the staid necessities of sponsors and television executives and team owners every single one of whom is a ruthless oil investor or the incompetent child of a rich person who spent his or her 20s driving sports cars into bodies of water and who all sit around in suits and force everyone around them to call them "mister," but springing from the deranged imagination of someone involved with professional wrestling. The XFL, in my head, involves a team called the Sacramento Blood Demons rising into the endzone while the entire linebacking corps wails on electric guitars.
The initial appeal of the XFL to me was not necessarily the violence or the implementation of rules dreamed up by every stoned football fan, but it was the fact that it was connected to wrestling, a theater of the absurd. The NFL at the time and now remains a stodgy, self-serious league that only allowed joy to be expressed once a week by Brett Favre; professional wrestling features undead zombie men, wrestlers reliably stunned into slack-jawed reverie by their arch-rival's theme song, and two guys from New Zealand whose entire gimmick involved silly walks. Football, long the purview of grim-voiced television analysts and autocrat coaches who force players to wrestle alligators if they are two seconds late to this 7:00 meeting and by 7:00 I mean 6:57 sharp could use that kind of levity. The NFL sports draconian celebration penalties. The NFL once specifically forbade players from doing "incredible hulk." In 2014, Richard Sherman gave a pro-wrestling-style interview that used Erin Andrews as a makeshift Mean Gene Okerlund and the entire football world lost its mind.
That's not the XFL Vince McMahon offers now. The new XFL will not have nose tackles giving long monologues about how they are going to pass rush someone through the gates of hell, they will not have quarterbacks who are pretending to be space aliens or angry bureaucrats from the internal revenue service, they will not have a team line up for a kick and then Gustav Holst's Mars the Bringer of War comes over the speakers and the quarterback comes running out of the tunnel with the offense to do a two-point conversion even though we all know that's exciting because it is basically how Kentucky chose to end the Music City Bowl. McMahon's XFL revival seems to be mainly about appealing to the people who have been losing their minds about players kneeling for the national anthem, full stop, which is the dumbest reason I can imagine for watching a minor-league sporting concern.
The sole entertainment value from the new XFL will be from whatever remainder bin quarterbacks end up starting for the Fort Wayne Reverse Mortgages and the five seconds of laughing at Jimmy Clausen getting sacked by a 45 year-old Julius Peppers will likely be its entire legacy instead of Jimmy Claws Son getting mauled by a 45-year-old Julius Peppers who has entered the stadium on third down in a smoke-filled boat accompanied by the Third Down Pass Rush Specialist brass band. We will never get the XFL we deserve.
Ronin, the John Frankenheimer espionage and car chase thriller, came out nearly twenty years ago. The film features an impossible, incoherent plot, inscrutable geopolitics, and De Niro grasping at the final straws of his late middle age action movie career. But the most important thing to take away from this movie is that is populated by an amazing assortment of henchmen, and the rest of this post is a comprehensive review of all of them.
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Even in a film stacked with malevolent, leather-clad henchman, this is the most aesthetically pleasing heavy in Ronin. He's bald with bulging eyes and a murderous leer; all of the other henchmen seem to know him because he's the ur-henchman of post-Cold War Europe, like how the Kurt Russell character in Death Proof was known among the stunt person community as "Stunt Man Mike" even in exclusively stuntmen milieus. "Sergi" (as he is listed in the credits) has a brief cameo in the movie. He skulks around with his nameless henchman associate, smartly dressed in the let's do crimes ensemble of leather jacket and black beanie, looking as suspicious as possible before wreaking absolute havoc upon a bevy of innocent tourists in an ancient Roman coliseum. This is an absolute tour-de-force henchman performance, pleasing to the eye, in action and in lurking around looking menacing.
One of the most delightful things about Ronin is that Frankenheimer fills the movie with spycraft by characters who are at all times acting as conspicuously as possible. None, though, have as much panache as this top-notch henchman (listed in the credits as "Dapper Gent" just an unbelievably pure henchman character name) who has gone above and beyond by wearing an overcoat without putting his arms through the sleeves. Surely there is a person who has done this in real life, a man who has decided that the conventions of modern overcoat technology are beneath him and that he must wear his coat as a makeshift cape even knowing that a stiff breeze could blow it off him and down the street as people run out of shops and scream at him "you could have prevented this by using sleeves" but I have never seen this done except in movies. Look at how brazen this is. He's sitting at a cafe, sipping on a tiny mug of espresso, carrying a briefcase, and sidling his way over to a fucking van. Even in the screenshot, look at all of the people staring at him making his big exit while posed like a classical Renaissance painting called The Nefarious Exchange. This guy meets one of the gorier ends in the movie after being unnerved by another bad guy's gambit to fire a gun that looks exactly like the transformer Megatron randomly at children. I love everything about this guy and I would definitely watch an entire prequel about him once MGM gets around to launching the Ronin Cinematic Universe.
Stellan Skasgard's Gregor is an excellent villain because he never expresses a single human emotion, all of his plans involve firing guns at innocent people, he tactically covers his eyes every time he's about to shoot a lock off a gate or a briefcase handcuffed to a henchman, and he says things like "I'll find a place to tilt the field to my favor." But the absolute best moment for Gregor is when he makes a daring escape from De Niro by leaping off a fence and doing some Tom Cruise-ass running while dressed like a disgraced community college accounting professor.
Frankenheimer really lays down the gauntlet henchman-wise in this first tense encounter. Here he unleashes the Car Henchmen. The first, a fast-talking arms dealer who could not be more suspicious if every single one of his lines ended with the phrase "I assure you, I will not try to murder you" is listed as "Man at Exchange" in the credits, a real tribute to the art of naming disposable henchmen. But the real innovation is his colleague, who appears in a tunnel dressed exactly like a member of an order of Evil Shriners who attack hospitals in miniature monster trucks. This encounter takes place in a seedy dock on the Seine-- there is absolutely no way that any human being witnessing an assemblage of these characters: the Homicidal Jazz Pianist, the Reverse Beefeater, and a crew involving Jean Reno, Sean Bean, and Robert De Niro who spends the entire movie looking as nonchalant as a spy infiltrating an Iron Curtain checkpoint with false papers, and not immediately recognize it as a den of criminal iniquity. These two, along with their entire crew including a bridge sniper, meet a predictably violent end, but Frankenheimer really sets up the world of Ronin as one that involves daring gun battles against a gang that looks like this and then no one remarks on it again for the rest of the movie.
The moment pictured above is the greatest triumph for Mikhi, a disappointing heavy. Here Mikhi allows for a brief moment of levity as he flees with a precious case in the chaos after the assassination of his girlfriend, a world-famous figure skater played by Katarina Witt who is shot with a sniper rifle in the middle of a performance during some sort of ice capade in the most ludicrous ice rink related climax to a '90s action movie that does not involve Jean-Claude Van Damme impersonating a hockey goalie to prevent the Chicago Blackhawks from inadvertently blowing up Pittsburgh. The one thing we know about Mikhi is that he dotes on his ladyfriend; to watch him so callously allow her to fall victim to a public execution and then do some Buster Keaton passport comedy undermines his whole bit. He's fine, but is not up to the admittedly impossible standard set by the bald guy, the overcoat guy, and the bespectacled fur hat guy that we've already seen plotting and waving guns around.
Ronin saves its shittiest heavy for the main villain. Jonathan Pryce is always revealed to be in a crowd, hiding, because his character is on the run as the mastermind of some sort of Super IRA. Ronin wants you to make sure that you know that he is a ridiculous Irish stereotype because he talks in a cartoonish brogue ("YA STUPID SHITE," he screams at De Niro in their climactic confrontation), slugs whiskey, dresses like an extra in a period-accurate attempt to stage one of the sex plays in the middle of Ulysses, and his name is Seamus O'Rourke. It's a tribute to the insane geopolitics of Ronin that his death (that occurred in the aftermath of the a high-profile figure skater assassination) is the final piece of the puzzle that allows the United Kingdom and Ireland to come to the Ronin version of the Good Friday Accords because presumably Seamus would be able to stop it by using the case to disrupt the meetings with an array of hearts, stars, horsehoes, clovers and a red balloon. Pryce does a good job here, but Ronin really needed a better villain than an anthropomorphic accent. Stellar eyebrows.
Sean Bean here really raises a central question when it comes to the art of henchman review. It's impossible to rate a henchman by effectiveness since all heavies, goons, and toughs will, by definition, be blundering oafs who die by gun, fist, explosion, and rotating helicopter blade. And even by that standard, Sean Bean (his character is "Spence" but let's be honest, like Jean Reno and De Niro, there's no point in naming him) is an inept fraud who has no idea how to buy guns from Car Henchmen, how to set up an ambush without killing everyone involved, or what color the boathouse is at Hereford. But that's his job in the movie-- to be the skittish nincompoop filled with unearned bravado to contrast with De Niro's cool competence and for that he is unassailable. The one aesthetic problem is that all inept henchmen deserve a glorious death, this one especially since he is played by cinematic death magnet Sean Bean. Instead, the character is sent away and warned not to speak of his exploits. We can take comfort in the fact that there is no way that this doofus could possibly go the rest of his life without discussing an arms deal derailed by a bridge sniper and that Seamus would certainly find him and kill him by punching him to death in a posture identical to the Notre Dame logo.
The wheel man is known as Larry, one of the most bizarre henchmen in the Ronin universe. He's not menacing at all, he doesn't seem capable of skulking and lurking, and while he's the driving specialist, virtually every other character with a speaking role also gets to demonstrate that he or she can drive a car through four lanes of oncoming traffic while only managing to kill a few dozen other motorists when they swerve to avoid them and their cars all instantly explode. Larry looks like an affable galoot; unlike the henchmen populating this film whose entire esthetic can be described as ostentatiously criminal, he resembles last guy on the substitute teacher call sheet. His greatest skill is making the ridiculous Mike Tyson's Punch Out face shown above when it's time to ram a car. Larry meets the most grotesque and violent end of anyone in the movie and you feel sad for him, the henchmen who didn't want to hurt anyone except the innocent people that perish wrapped around concrete pillars while he's driving an Audi at 70 miles per hour through a city designed to repel Visigoths.
Spectacular henchman. Bald, in sunglasses, and wracked with terror as his car is rammed and chased through narrow streets. "The Target," as he is credited, really gives you everything you need for the guy handcuffed to a briefcase. The car chases in Ronin are incredible because they are all for the most part real stunts-- according to the commentary on the DVD, the scene where De Niro blows up a car with a rocket launcher involved actually rigging up some sort of explosive under a car and having a stuntman just get sort of safely blown up and then coast around a twisting mountain road upside down coasting on the roof. During this car chase, Frankenheimer gives a brief establishing close-up of a fishmarket seconds before like twelve cars plow through it because he knows exactly the movie he is making.
The fish market scene must have been where Frankenheimer planned to insert Ron Jeremy (credited as "Fishmonger" and billed as "Ron Hiatt") to amuse and titillate viewers who wanted to see a squat, mustachioed porno actor gesticulate angrily at a small convoy of high-performance sports cars who have made his mongering impossible, but we will never know because Frakenheimer cut him out.
The discerning reader might question why Jean Pierre here (played by Michael Lonsdale) is included in a henchman and heavy review. If anything, he is at best henchman-adjacent-- providing sanctuary for a wounded De Niro, performing extremely amateur bullet removal surgery, becoming a magical source of information to allow the heroes to instantly track down everyone they need to, and clumsily explaining the title of the movie via elaborate Samurai miniatures. But I needed to include him here only because Michael Lonsdale was also in the BBC version of Smiley's People as a bumbling Soviet agent who eerily resembles Crystal Skull-era Dan Akroyd.
“I think the kids wanted to go for it. They wanted to try and win it and I don’t fault the effort at all…They deserved the opportunity to have it in their hands,” is what Kentucky's Athletic Director Mitch Barnhart said about coach Mark Stoops's decision to go for two at the end of the game. But I prefer to think that Stoops knew that he did not want to go to overtime against Northwestern, a team that does nothing but allow teams to go into overtime, to watch the scoreboard hit zero and to win games in a vortex where linear time no longer has meaning, where the game could stretch into infinity and there's no clock to manage, and that Stoops had stayed up all night reading a monograph entitled Schroedinger's 'Cats: Quantum Mechanics and Northwestern's Inexplicable Nine-Win Season and the implications were terrifying enough for him to do anything he could to end things in regulation. Also it was cold and the game had already entered its nineteenth hour.
Opposing coaches go to overtime against Northwestern
The Franco-American Music City Bowl ended on an exciting last play, but will be best remembered as an all-encompassing descent into madness. There were bizarre coaching calls on all sides-- Stoops's decision to go for two, Fitzgerald's disastrous trick plays dreamed up after a pregame meal of hot chicken spiced with psilocybin mushrooms, and the takeover of the game by a Maniac Referee who entered the field dressed in a cape and headdress made of writhing snakes.
The program said that the referee crew came from the Pac-12 Conference, but my guess is that a group of wilderness raiders drove up on the referee's vehicle, seized it in a daring heist using balancing poles and grappling hooks and numerous bellowing guys with Aron Baynes haircuts and leather armor, and impersonated the crew with the goal of sowing chaos.
The Pac-12 Conference sends its officials to a Bowl Game
That would explain the reason why the first half took more than two hours to complete because they sent every call to a grotesque carnival parody replay crew, why they ejected Paddy Fisher for targeting a receiver with his arms, and why, when Kentucky running back Benny Snell lightly brushed against a grasping official, they had him thrown into a pit beneath Titan Stadium.
The Nortorious Benny Snell begins his reign of terror against innocent referees
Northwestern's win prevented the bowl from becoming a complete debacle after they carted Clayton Thorson off the field. The Wildcats then turned to veteran backup Matt Alviti, a senior who never started a game and whose major contribution to the anticipated game plan involved growing a spectacular mustache. Alviti didn't make mistakes and moved the chains with a quarterback rushing attack Kentucky would have never seen coming unless they dusted off their Kain Colter tape. Alviti's heroics were bittersweet for Northwestern fans who had been rooting for him for years and were hoping he'd have a chance to get into a game and apparently made those wishes known to the nearest monkey's paw.
Northwestern won the same way they managed to win all year-- a stout defense against the run (though it helped that Snell got ejected, Northwestern's rush defense battled without Nate Hall and without egregious ejection victim Paddy Fisher whom I hope spent the second half commiserating with Snell in that fancy ice cream place on Broadway), a timely interception from turnover hero Kyle Queiro, and of course Justin Jackson. Jackson finished his Northwestern career with 157 yards on the ground, two touchdowns, a second consecutive bowl MVP trophy, and a mind-melting bevy of records including virtually every record at Northwestern, third all-time in Big Ten rushing yards, and an ascent to the top ten in rush yards in major college football history. Even Jackson's records and accolades don't fully explain how good his career has been at Northwestern; the Wildcats' offense for four years has hinged on Jackson or the threat of Jackson causing teams to use the entirety of their scholarship players to try to stop him and allow Northwestern's quarterbacks to throw the ball to open receivers, many of whom are also Justin Jackson.
Justin Jackson the Trophy Carrier
The Music City Bowl managed to be the apotheosis of Northwestern's bizarre season. They got stuck in a perilously close game, battled through heart-rending late comebacks, persevered through a truly bizarre array of fourth-down decisions and ludicrous trick plays that Wile E. Coyote would scoff at as unnecessarily complicated, and managed to hang on to a win. The egghead football statistics guys say that close games decided by a touchdown or less not to mention overtime are toss-ups completely dependent on luck; Northwestern won every single one of them and did so in a fashion that seems to defy science and mathematics and gets into metaphysical realms that turn into religion. The 2017 Wildcats were an excellent football team and one that also seemed buoyed by a series of football miracles.
Game-saving Two Point Conversion Preventer Marcus McShepard
defends the pass with an Unholy Incantation
By the time that Stephen Johnson's pass floated through the fingertips of a heretofore unstoppable Tavin Richardson, it was no longer possible to root for Northwestern as a football team but necessary to do so with robes, orbs, candles, foam hats in the shape of wildcat heads, and other miscellaneous religious implements as they watched another pass fall incomplete to the ground and Pat Fitzgerald bellow from the sidelines in an otherworldly tongue and the band launch into its ancient hymn "U Northwestern Rah" into the ashen faces of the fans of the Apostate Wildcat fleeing into the freezing Nashville air and back into the arms of their true religion because did you see the score of the Louisville game.
