Save Your Legs!

Overview

The Abbotsford Anglers are a lousy, Saturday morning, suburban cricket team, led by Ted (Stephen Curry), a sweet but kinda hopeless guy who lives in a mate's garage and works at a sports store. When his best mate, Rick (Brendan Cowell), announces his plans to marry and have children (which, to the boyish Ted, amounts to no less than treason), Ted can see his beloved cricket team will be overtaken by nappies, wives and all the other dreadful trappings of manhood. Oblivious to the inevitable fact that the times and the nature of his friendships are a-changing, Ted leads his D-grade team into the depths of India for a tour of glorified park cricket. It’s here that tensions arise, friendships are frayed, life lessons are learned and Ted must finally man up, grow up and fondly leave his teenage dreams behind.

Save Your Legs! is about as blokey and Strayne, and silly as you’d expect a cricket bromance penned by Brendan Cowell to be. There's alot of toilet humour and alot of Channel Nine's "Wide World of Sports" theme music going on. Admittedly, I’m not the film’s target audience member (in other words, I’m not a cricket-obsessed, "nice Aussie bloke"), but it’s lovely to see a film that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Until it does, when the cricket metaphors start coming thick and fast (“There’s only one innings in life. You only get once chance” and so forth).

Underlying all the beer and bravado, Save Your Legs! is about mateship and coming of age, with an affectionate portrait of everyday Aussie battlers that puts it in the same cinematic bracket as The Castle and Kenny. If the idea of a crew of drink-addled guys swanning around stoking chaos sounds familiar, it's because the film is also a bit of an Australianisation of The Hangover. Cowell and Curry give endearing performances as man-boys who are forcefully and finally shoved out of adolescence and into adulthood at the ripe old age of thirty-five. As a lighthearted, nostalgia-drenched film, Save Your Legs! hits a six.