Winning Ugly

By RICHARD CORLISS

ALL THE RIGHT MOVES

Directed by Michael Chapman

Screenplay by Michael Kane

Everybody's somebody's baby, especially when Hollywood goes on a field trip for new stars. Nothing succeeds like last year's success, and this year the talent scouts came back with Tom Cruise, who looks like a baby-faced Christopher Reeve. Here he is, Superman in miniature (Reeve is 6 ft. 4 in., Cruise 5 ft. 9 in.): the hooded eyes, the sculpted body, the off-beat comic timing, the self-deprecating manner, the winning smile. Cruise played a psychotic cadet in Taps, a winsome greaser in The Outsiders, but it was in Paul Brickman's sleek and sexy summer comedy Risky Business that Cruise first turned on the wattage. Star power has translated into box-office dollars: in its first eleven weeks Risky Business earned $56 million, lying Cruise with Michael Keaton (of the equally successful Mr. Mom) as a surprise package of 1983.

Now Cruise travels from the Chicago North Shore glitz of Risky Business to the dying towns of the Appalachian Coal Belt lo play a working-class jock in All the Right Moves. Life here is picturesquely grim. Shanties that look as if they were about to implode perch uneasily on streets set at a San Francisco diagonal. The JUST MARRIED legend on the car of a young bride and groom is scrawled in Polish; Ihe not-so-happy couple plans to honeymoon in Pittsburgh. The guys al the Ampipe steel mill who have not been laid off probably wish they could be, and Ihe high school football team manages lo blow its big game against an upscale rival. The only escape route for Stefan Djordjevic (Cruise) is a college sports scholarship, and his prospects look grim: the coach (Craig T. Nelson) thinks Stef has a "bad attitude." He needs Ihe love of his good woman Lisa (Lea Thompson) lo keep him from falling into the slough of his family's steelworker tradition.

The background of All the Right Moves may be gunmetal gray, but the characters and situations are as colorful as your favorite coming-of-age cliches. These teen-agers are good-looking kids with big dreams and a bright line of patter. The coach carries on like a sensitive drill sergeant, psyching his team into a football frenzy by using curses, inspirational locker-room speeches and the odd face-mask violation. Michael Chapman, who graduated to the director's chair with this film after making his name as the cinematographer of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Personal Best, brings a virginal intensity to each hoary plot device. He hardly gives his audience time to realize that the football team is only an updated platoon from a 1940s war movie (the Irishman with his well-fingered rosary, the Italian with his letch for the ladies, the slow Poles and happy blacks), or that the big football game follows a scenario that is both predictable and improbable (with only a few seconds left to play, the coach calls for a hand-off in his own end zone in monsoon mud), or that the heroine is called upon to utter lines that Gale Page would have found too naive to speak in Knute Rockne --All American.

It is precisely this clear-eyed disingenuousness that may make All the Right Moves a hit on date nights this fall. Today's teen-agers may talk hip and move fast, but when it comes to movies, they still like their coal dust leavened with fairy dust. Stefan's dream comes true; the coach turns out to be a mensch; Lisa stands by her man. With Tom Cruise luring the girls into the theater, and high school machismo hooking the boys, this naive little movie hopes to prove itself the Flashdance of football .

-- By Richard Corliss This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.