A canny observation was made about Netflix's recent East of Eden adaptation: it was a platform misfit, feeling more like an HBO show. The same could be said about The Mosquito Bowl, Netflix's new war picture, which would be more at home on Paramount Plus with its Taylor Sheridan diehards, or even on Amazon Prime with its Reacher fans.
Based on a true story, it is a conservative-coded dad picture that, two decades prior, might have been a prestige production helmed by Clint Eastwood or even Steven Spielberg. Times have changed, and The Mosquito Bowl comes to us as a streaming B-movie, directed by Peter Berg, featuring B-level leads. After a one-week theatrical run, it is being shoveled into the queues of Netflix subscribers, though what constitutes a 'Netflix film' would beat the streamer itself: When you have something for everyone, you have no identity.
The Mosquito Bowl follows real-life American football players John McLaughry (Nicholas Galitzine), Bob Baumann (Bill Skarsgård), Tony Butkovich (Ray Nicholson), and Dave Schreiner (Tom Francis). They enlist after Pearl Harbor and are dispatched to the Pacific theater.
Berg's unwavering commitment to making a four-hero picture is an early casualty, as every single banal trope is repeated four times over. There is an intro scene showing the athletic prowess of each man; each man gets a family moment, a teary good-bye, a recruitment scene, a boot camp moment and so on. Netflix isn't ever beating the charges of AI-assisted templatized filmmaking to make sure you can follow the picture when you return from a diarrhea break or laundry errand.
The dull, expository backstories lead into limp training and battle scenes, à la Full Metal Jacket and Flags of Our Fathers. An early American attack rips off the opening of Saving Private Ryan beat-for-beat, without contributing anything novel to the staging of World War II combat. Jacques Jouffret's cinematography is equally derivative, approximating the stately, desaturated, underlit appearance of earlier, better pictures. The episodic structure leads from one battle location to the next, with little variety, as the audience waits for the titular football game.
When the advertised event arrives, the shock of its insignificance drowns out the alarm raised by the incompetence of the preceding script. In the annals of World War II events, the Mosquito Bowl might occupy a small portion of one bullet point, in a footnote, to a thousand-page book, part of a 20-volume set. There is barely enough material for a vertical YouTube short, let alone an epic war film.
No wonder it lasts all of 8 minutes, doesn't arrive until 90 minutes in, and Berg dispenses with it as a minor diversion between combat sequences. It seems a little perverse to name the film after an event it is barely about, though the movie does take its title from the non-fiction book it is based on. The football game between soldiers is so abruptly and awkwardly dropped into the narrative that you could cut it out entirely without affecting the larger picture.
The Mosquito Bowl seems like it was made only so that Berg could make a war picture, and the price paid was staging a vapid football game. There is a smallness of scale to The Mosquito Bowl that is endemic to modern American filmmaking: all shallow-focus medium shots, indifferent blocking and quick cutting for a distinctly televisual feel. Despite a safe, down-the-middle premise, no chances are taken, nothing unsavory is said or seen, and the audience is unchallenged throughout.
There is a moralizing tone to war violence, which is again meant to coddle modern sensibilities rather than subvert them. "Artistic" touches amount to baffling shots of the earth and random cross-cutting with documentary footage of the events being recreated, all with little purpose or motivation.
Playing gruff, square, all-American archetypes, there is nothing much for the actors to do, yet a modicum of personality or screen presence might have made The Mosquito Bowl more tolerable. Nicholson and Skarsgård fare better, especially Nicholson, who at least attempts to create an abrasive, antagonistic persona.
Francis and Galitzine are exceedingly lifeless, particularly Galitzine, who is a charisma-free plank of wood as the nominal lead of the film. After Masters of the Universe and this film, you might think Galitzine is not cut out to be a leading man despite his agents' best attempts. The excruciatingly trite dialogue, courtesy of Berg and Mark L. Smith's boneheaded screenplay, doesn't do them any favors.
The Mosquito Bowl is a risible poser of a war movie that might provide appropriate white noise while you clean the toilet, as it was no doubt designed. For anyone interested in learning about the titular event, a TikTok reel might provide equivalent insight for one-hundredth of the time investment.
After a brief theatrical engagement, the film makes its Netflix premiere on Wednesday, November 25.