The 2000s Movie Project: The Toxic Masculinity of Play it to the Bone

We have proof that Ron Shelton is a talented director. His Bull Durham is an unquestionable masterpiece. Bull Durham is arguably the greatest baseball movie ever made. Bull Durham is romantic, quirky, funny and dedicated deeply to the love of baseball. Bull Durham comes from a director who is assured, confident and masterfully in control of tone and style. How did that same director also make Play it to the Bone?

Now, Ron Shelton is not a revered and respected auteur. He’s really only remembered for Bull Durham, if we are being brutally honest. And yet, Play it to the Bone stands out as so toxic, so misguided and unfortunate, that it affects how I see Bull Durham. I still love Bull Durham but I worry that if I watch it again something of Shelton’s toxic instincts demonstrated in Play it to the Bone might leak out of the subtext of Bull Durham if I were to look too closely. (Nah, I checked, it's still great.)

Play it to the Bone stars Antonio Banderas Cesar and Woody Harrelson as Vince. The two are best friends and boxers with troubled pasts. Cesar was once such a strong contender that he fought a champion at Madison Square Garden. Vince once also came close to glory only to come up short on a corrupt judges decision. The duo is now getting a second chance at glory, if only after a series of unfortunate events.

In Las Vegas, the under-card of a pay per view fight headlined by none other than Mike Tyson, has crapped out. One of the fighters has suffered a drug overdose after a night of partying. His opponent is worse… he’s dead, his night of partying ended in a vehicle crash. Desperate to replace his under card, promoter Joe Domino (Tom Sizemore) and his partner and casino mogul, Hank (Robert Wagner), call upon Cesar and Vince.

From here, Play it to the Bone becomes an ungodly long and desperately unfunny road comedy. Cesar and Vince pile into Cesar’s girlfriend’s muscle car, because vehicles in road trip movies are required to be cool convertibles with loud engines. Lolita Davidovich plays Grace, Cesar’s girlfriend and Vince’s ex-girlfriend. During the drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, Grace will break up with Cesar, and rebuff Vince, while their collective backstories are relayed in supremely dull and talky scenes.

Davidovich is stranded in Shelton's version of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She's the cool chick who likes muscle cars and loud engines. She's everything to every man and she can take a punch. Yeah, there's a lovely scene where Davidovich gets punched in the face by, of all people, Robert Wagner (Yikes), and takes it because that's how cool chicks in movies react when they get punched by men, they wipe off the blood and just go on with life (Yuck).

The nadir of Play it to the Bone, aside from the punching women, arrives at about the mid-point of the movie when Cesar reveals that he was gay but only for a little while. This revelation shakes Vince to his core and in a better movie, this might lead to both characters growing in understanding of each other and their friendship. In Play it to the Bone however, it’s used as a vehicle for the repeated, unending and thudding use of a three letter gay slur.

The no-homo posturing of Play it to the Bone is punishing and ugly and lasts throughout the movie. Again, a better movie might be able to make something of the childishness of these characters and their frivolous concern over their masculine identities. Instead, Play it to the Bone wallows in this childish behavior and coddles the worst instincts of the stunted man-children who giggle when they hear that three letter slur.

Of course,I can’t be surprised that a sports movie made in the year 2000 doesn’t meet the woke standards of 20 years later but that doesn’t make the witlessness of Play it to the Bone any less jarring. There is zero nuance to this apparently very important plot point. The movie makes repeated references to the time Cesar spent having sex with men and yet the only takeaway from these repeated references is how the script uses that three letter slur as a punchline.

It’s apparent that repeatedly using gay slurs is Ron Shelton’s idea of hilarious. Forget building actual character traits or investing these characters with a lived in experience, nope, just say that word over and over again like middle school children in the 80’s. Even in the year 2000 Play it to the Bone felt like it was some old man’s boorish notion of comedy. It’s only more insulting that since Play it to the Bone, Banderas has gone on to play several incredibly nuanced and thoughtful gay characters.

Just last year, Banderas earned an Oscar nomination for his role as a gay film director in Pain and Glory. That character was deeply flawed and complex, his sexuality didn’t define him but it was also given depth and felt lived in. That’s how great characters feel, they give the impression of an actual life lived. The characters in Play it to the Bone never leave the page, they are ugly, boring caricatures acting out the antiquated cliches of a writer-director barely surviving on past glory.

I haven’t even reached the boxing portion of Play it to the Bone and already I am exhausted from talking about this movie. The boxing scenes are nearly as toxic and punishing as the road trip ‘comedy.’ For reasons that defy logic and good taste, Shelton repeatedly shoves female nudity into the boxing scenes of Play it to the Bone. Harrelson’s character is apparently so delusionally obsessed with his heterosexuality that he hallucinates naked ring girls. At one point, two ring girls begin to engage in a sex act between rounds. The reason? No Homo!

Shelton then has Banderas briefly hallucinate that the male referee is nude and showing his muscular backside. I can only guess that hallucinating the referee’s frontal nudity would have also set off Shelton’s ‘No Homo’ alarm. That hallucination is followed by Cesar searching the crowd for Davidovich’s character so he can say I love you because heaven forbid he continue to have non-hetero-normative thoughts.

Believe me, if you think I am obsessing about the sexual politics of Play it to the Bone, the movie is just as obsessed in exactly the wrong way. I can imagine a universe where a character having ambiguous sexuality and a friend having issues with that could lead to drama of some depth and meaning. Play it to Bone is not that movie. This is a movie made by people who are desperately threatened by the idea of male homosexuality to a point that is almost comically lacking in self-awareness.

In another universe, the punishingly silly boxing of Play it to the Bone would be used as a way for these two characters to come to terms with each other. The boxing would be layered heavily with the subtext of their shared history and the complex feelings of a long term, intimate male friendship. All the messiness of their shared history with Davidovich, the discomfort of Banderas’ revelation about his sexuality, Harrelson’s feelings of revulsion but also betrayal that his close friend kept this from him, would come to a head.

That does not happen in the version of Play it to the Bone we actually get. Instead, we get blood, and boobs, and boxing that makes Rocky’s battles look realistic. I happen to be a huge fan of boxing and watching the boxing scenes of Play it to the Bone felt more like a bad video game than anything remotely like the sweet science. We’re meant to believe that the repeated knock downs and buckets of blood in Play it to the Bone is redeeming the careers of these two lost legends but the dramatic punch of Play it to the Bone never lands.

Instead, Play it to the Bone plays more like ‘No Homo: The Movie’ than anything remotely resembling a great sports movie. It’s baffling to me because Bull Durham exists. We’ve seen Ron Shelton create indelible characters who feel as if they’ve always lived. Those characters weren’t perfect, they weren’t ‘woke’ they had foibles and flaws that were treated with care and complexity within a universe of adults.

Play it to the Bone meanwhile is regressive male fantasy. It’s toxic masculinity at its ugliest. It’s sexist and homophobic in ways that belong more to the 1970’s than to the year 2000. Somehow, this movie feels older than Bull Durham and far more out of step with time than a movie that precedes it by nearly a decade and a half. Was Ron Shelton suddenly in the throes of a mid-life crisis and thought he needed to demonstrate his deep commitment to heterosexuality?

The years following Play it to the Bone showed no improvement either. Shelton’s most recent effort, the old guy comedy, Just Getting Started starring Morgan Freeman and Tommy Lee Jones, showed that Shelton can barely even operate on a basic level of film-making and storytelling anymore. Just Getting Started isn’t as toxic as Play it to the Bone in terms of character but on a level of film-making and basic storytelling, he’s barely on the level of your average YouTube wannabe director. At least YouTube guy has budget to blame for not getting enough footage to get proper coverage, what was Shelton's excuse that he could barely cut a movie with enough footage to make sense on a basic level of film language?

It doesn’t change my love for Bull Durham, that film remains untouchable classic. It only makes that film the anomaly rather than the rule of Ron Shelton’s career. He’s a guy who got lucky once and found that alchemy of stars and story that only happens once in a great while. Bull Durham is perhaps that one time when a terrible baseball player got that one pitch that even they couldn’t miss and got that one hit that they still talk about today in a career filled with strikeouts.