Oh, Rodney Dangerfield…you never get any respect.  Not until the end of your movies, at any rate. And you’ll spend ninety minutes in a bid to get that respect in Ladybugs, which Lions Gate sent me a copy of on Blu-ray to review.

Rodney hits the field as Chester Lee, a man out to marry a single mother. And like so many people who’ve tried in that regard, it’s not going well. Matthew, hopefully Chester’s stepson, isn’t taking the whole thing well. And Chester’s going to have a tough time getting his girlfriend, Bess the single mother, to marry him on his current salary. So in a bid to get a promotion, and the raise that goes with it, Chester agrees to coach the girls’ soccer team his company sponsors.  But the Ladybugs–the team in question–are having a “rebuilding year”, which means that Chester’s job is going to be a tough one. But he’s got a secret weapon in the form of Chester’s stepson-to-be.

This is one of those movies that falls into the category of, like many, many other sports movies before it, “it’s trite but it works”.  Dangerfield will crack off many of the one-liners that you expect him to. The shy slightly tubby girl will come out of her shell and do great things you don’t expect her to. The spoiled, shallow girl will discover that breaking a nail hammers her berserk button like no tomorrow and of course, Matthew will grow closer to Chester, and Jonathan Brandis is still the same grade of cheesy actor he was back when he was playing The Wesley on SeaQuest DSV. He may not be listed there, but I call him a Wesley every time.

But like I said, it may be cheesy, trite, and have more tropes and cliches per square meter than even many sports movies will have, but for crying out loud, it works. This is the critical point–it works. It’s funny. It’s a little heartwarming. People grow, change, there’s a happy ending, it lets you walk away from it feeling good. And at the end of the day, that’s pretty good.

Ladybugs is no one’s idea of a great movie. It is, however, most people’s idea of a good movie, and that’s why the Screenhead Ten Scale is going to hand this one a six out of ten. It breaks no new ground, it does nothing particularly impressively, but it does what it does fairly well with a reasonable degree of success.