The second Sunday in February has arrived, bringing with it the annual spike in Frito-Lay revenue and the sudden influx of unsolicited ball knowledge from otherwise average viewers of football. These are harbingers of only one event each year — the Super Bowl. Some are there for the commercials, some for the halftime show, some just for moral support when, inevitably, one of the two teams in the competition loses.
Nonetheless, the Super Bowl remains a seminal, indelible touchpoint of monoculture, without which things like Left Shark or Rihanna’s second pregnancy announcement would not exist –– and into which, voluntarily or involuntarily, hundreds of millions of individuals will be tuning this upcoming Sunday. A similar cultural dissonance exists with sports movies, often judged for their subject instead of their substance. And, with greater relevance to this weekend, there are many great sports scenes in movies that are not sports movies. As such, and in honor of Super Bowl LX, here are some of the best football scenes from non-football movies.
Forrest Gump (1994)
Football enters the 1994 Best Picture winner almost by accident, by way of an elegant sight gag. Running through a high school football game to escape bullies, Tom Hanks’ Forrest is spotted by a coach, at which point the sequence neatly match cuts to his thriving collegiate career. Indeed, Forrest ends up an All-American football player for the University of Alabama because of his unstoppable, undeterred speed. But this is far from a traditional football movie — rather, the film follows Forrest as he navigates physical disabilities, service in the Vietnam War and countless other cultural hallmarks of the twentieth century. There is no montage, no training sequence and no suggestion that Forrest has learned anything new about the sport –– he simply runs, and the world continues to run around him.
Napoleon Dynamite (2004)
Just as an iconic Super Bowl moment can be considered the proverbial Roman Empire for a subset of a cultural audience, football may be the Roman Empire of Jon Gries’ Uncle Rico in this coming-of-age indie. Rico lives too much in his head, haunted by wasted years and fruitless lamentation and the absolute certainty that back in 1982, he had the potential to be a great football star. Instead, Rico is forced to make his own highlight tapes on a tripod outside of his RV with the delusional hopes that it will catch the attention of a recruiter. Made even more depressing by his and Kip’s exploits in attempted time travel, Uncle Rico’s story is a tragedy of missed opportunity, but even more, it emphasizes the power that football holds, to make or break the spirit –– just as they are on wintry February nights.
Wedding Crashers (2005)
“Crab cakes and football, that’s what Maryland does!” is the satirical exclamation that follows the first touchdown in this backyard game of touch football, thrown off a long spiral of questionable form by Christopher Walken’s character, William. Director David Dobkin reportedly maximized the audio on every hit Vince Vaughn’s Jeremy suffers at the hands of the aptly-named Sack, played by Bradley Cooper –– prompting sympathetic winces from the audience and irritated disbelief from John, played by Owen Wilson. The scene works not only as a riff on a game that one party is taking far too seriously –– a familiar experience for many a casual Super Bowl viewer –– but also a celebration of the hits, both literal and figurative, that friends are willing to take for each other.
The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Though not quite on the level of his most recent cinematic experiments in explosion, the football scene in the final installment of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy certainly goes out with a bang. Former NFL receiver Hines Ward makes a cameo as a kick returner for the fictional Gotham Rogues who, much like Forrest Gump, takes the ball all the way back for a touchdown –– as the supervillain Bane, played by Tom Hardy, triggers a bomb and collapses the field underneath him. Despite a lack of fidelity in its football elements, the sequence is undeniably spectacular, a tour de force for Nolan that also cements Hardy’s big bad almost on par with Heath Ledger’s Joker in his commitment to chaos and destruction on a mass scale.
Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
No list about iconic sports scenes in movies would be complete without an entry from the “Top Gun” cinematic universe, ever lauded for its relentless combination of baby oil and beach activities. The football sequence in the 2022 legacy sequel is positioned as a major bonding moment for its pilot players, but is really just an excuse to have Glen Powell and Miles Teller roll around shirtless in a two minute sequence that has since accumulated millions of views on YouTube. Even more impressive than Powell and Teller’s abs, though, is the actors’ execution of “dogfight football” –– an absolute nonsense iteration of the game wherein offense and defense are ostensibly taking place at the same time. Who is to say if the concept could hold merit in a world not operating under uniquely Tom Cruise-shaped laws of physics, but it certainly holds audiences’ attention.
In these films, football is not only a plot device, but a cultural shorthand. Perhaps that accessibility is why the motif is able to succeed, and even thrive, in non-sports movies –– one does not have to care about the game to understand the emotions that it evokes. Whether played straight, satirized or detonated entirely, the sport becomes a vessel for something larger. And much like the Super Bowl, these scenes endure, not because of football, but because of all that it is able to represent.
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