Metacritic reviews

Home Team is one of the most conceptually-strange cinematic ventures I’ve ever seen, an image management exercise disguised as a scruffy kids comedy.

Kevin James is at once the film’s most obvious brand signifier and its most surprising asset: As a heavily fictionalized Payton, his surly hangdog energy gives this corndog of a movie what flavor it has.

Pretend it’s not a “true story” and it’s still a shallow representation of sports, parenthood, and comedy, with almost no laughs.

I think I laughed once.

It’s yet another comedy of indignities — sorry, make that inanities.

Driven by big-truck energy and lumbered with tired sports clichés and flat jokes, Home Team feels like its target audience is bad dads who don’t like spending time with their sons.