Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson may have been one fierce fake competitor in his professional wrestling days, but this huge mass of muscled flesh just had his ass handily handed to him, acting wise, by a little girl. Somebody should have warned Johnson about taking acting classes from Steven Seagal. Late in the movie, there is a scene where a tear is shed by the big man in a screen filling head shot and I’m sure everyone in the theater, all three of us, were thinking “CGI.” In “The Game Plan”, Johnson plays a spoiled star NFL quarterback who wakes up one day to find out he’s the father of an eight-year-old girl he never knew existed. Madison Pettis, who plays the daughter, isn’t exactly a gifted child actress herself and handles her role about as convincingly as Roseanne would playing an anorexic. This awful acting was but only one ingredient in this rancid stew. Director Andy Fickman who had given us such prior gems as “Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical” and the play “Jewtopia” was joined by three writers, one of whom had no prior writing credits, and another whose only other writing credit was for the game show The Mole. Who would have thought this combination of stellar talents would result in a comedy with only slightly fewer laughs than Schindler’s List?

We watch as Johnson’s character, Joe Kingman, prepares for the playoff and championship games all the while imparting the kind of wisdom and inspiration to his newly found daughter that would drive any normal kid straight to Britneyville. The daughter Peyton, played by Pettis, is no normal kid, though. The writers penned this character not as a child, but as a height-challenged adult saying oh so clever stuff that would never come out of a kid’s mouth. The result is scenes filled with enough sugary sap to make a Vermont maple envious.

I realize that I’m about a half-century older than this movie’s target demographic, but I can’t help but think that if this cinematic abomination were indeed designed for the little ones, than someone should alert Child Protective Services. My hat is off to any child who can manage to sit through this movie’s slow moving 110 minutes without the aid of tranquilizers and physical restraints. Even the football action sequences were boring as they consisted mostly of showing the exact same play four different times. It was almost enough to make me and the other two audience members hang up our cell phones and hurl them at the screen. The physical comedy attempts were ham fisted, unfunny, and quite enough to make Moe Howard actually slap somebody were he alive today.

As if “The Game Plan” weren’t enough, the director and the star have been again teamed to give us “Witch Mountain” in 2009. But I’ll pass on paying ten bucks to see Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson again in favor of seeing the more convincing and far funnier Larry “The Wide Stance” Craig for free at his next press conference.

--Coaster