Maybe the best offense in a real football game is a good defense. Not so in a movie about the early years of the sport, when pro football was a poor cousin to the college game.

George Clooney's "Leatherheads" plays everything safe, offering up all the solid defensive moves it needs. Great period costumes, jazzy music, 1920s slang, all of which combine for a nice re-creation of the feel of the era, with Renee Zellweger a sound choice to play a saucy reporter opposite Clooney's gridiron grunt.

Yet the movie never takes any risks, never goes on the offensive, never dances giddily along the sideline on some bold storytelling equivalent of a broken-field run the way you'd like to see in a throwback to old screwball comedies.

It's all perfectly pat, and sadly, perfectly boring, for the most part. In chronicling pro football's transition from laughable frivolity to true spectator sport in 1925, "Leatherheads" proves feather-light.

There's no figure in modern Hollywood more amiable and admirable than Clooney, and "Leatherheads" was a chance for him to lighten up as a filmmaker after his strange but sober directing debut "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" and his masterful drama "Good Night, and Good Luck."