THE SENIOR - Mark Reviews Movies

The Senior, Angel Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 18, 2025

Some opening narration in The Senior states that this story isn't actually about football, and screenwriter Robert Eisele wisely keeps that promise. Indeed, one could take out the scenes relating to the sport or change it into something else entirely, and the core of this tale, about a man who realizes that a second chance in life is about more than getting what you think you want, would remain intact.

It's based on a true story—a seemingly unlikely one, at that, too. That's the story of Mike Flynt, a man who started playing college football again at the age of 59. This is the kind of story that makes headlines for the curiosity and the inspirational factor of it, but Eisele and director Rod Lurie want to dig deeper than that. Why would a man risk so much on a sport, and what does his decision to try to get back into a football, at an age when even professional players would be a couple decades or more into retirement, say about this man?

The story is not, despite the encouraging novelty of it, a cheery one. Mike is played by Michael Chiklis, who would have been exactly or about the same age when he was shooting the film as when Flynt returned to the sport. That makes the performance a fairly impressive physical feat unto itself, since we can see him doing a lot of the training exercises and more on screen.

Beyond that, Chiklis gets at the less-admirable sides of this character as his body and life undergo a lot of pain and struggle for relatively little reward. The real story here is more about family than anything—how Mike was turned into a specific type of person by his domineering father, how he has become that type of father to his own son, how that chip on his shoulder and an inherently selfish goal basically set him against the entirety of his own family.

It's a very good thing that his wife Eileen (Mary Stuart Masterson) is patient, understands him, and thinks that divorce is quitting—something she was raised to never do. It's genuinely refreshing that the film and Masterson's performance actually give her character enough strength to be a deciding factor in her own marriage, too. She expects things from her husband as he sets out on this potentially dangerous mission to fulfill some long-lingering dream, and Eileen is written to state those things plainly and put Mike in his place when he doesn't live up to them.

This is important for Mike, too, because he's just stubborn, bitter, and regret-filled enough to get himself killed without the right person putting things in perspective for him. Surely, he got some of that from his own father, played in flashbacks by James Badge Dale, who mainly taught his son that the only way to get through life is to literally fight one's way through it. In those flashbacks, young Mike (played by Preston Alkire) is basically beaten bruised and bloody by his old man in "boxing" training, with the promise that the father will beat him if he ever finds out his son has backed down from or lost a flight.

His habit of fighting got Mike kicked out of college in his senior year, just before the start of football season. Now working construction and still looking for fights in everyday situations decades later, Mike attends a college reunion, is told by some former teammates that he technically could join the football team if he returns to finish his final year, and makes it his goal to get back on the field. He wants to do this even though he's older than the parents of his potential teammates and, indeed, the squad's head coach Sam (Rob Corddry).

The football side of this narrative is intentionally anticlimactic. Mike goes through rigorous tryouts against young men several decades young than him, as well as even more trying practice sessions with and against teammates who have youthful reserves of energy. No one takes it easy on him, and even after making the team, Sam has no real desire to put him on the field.

None of that really matters, though, because Mike is injured during practice, so all of the hard work looks as if it might have been for nothing. Where does that leave this man, who now has to go through physical therapy to try to raise his arm above his shoulder and face the very real possibility that his dreams of being on the field in a football game again might be finished?

From the start, the story has been about Mike, the kind of person he is and the one his upbringing never allowed him to be, so the absence of football from the narrative for a while becomes a benefit to the film. He confronts his past by way of his mother (played by Gail Cronauer) and her knowledge of all of the regrets Mike's father had after his son stopped speaking to him, and he realizes he and his own adult son Micah (Brandon Flynn) are essentially repeating that cycle. The two speak to each other, but neither really knows how to actually talk to the other about anything that really matters—especially when it comes to why there's tension and distance between them.

That relationship means something, as does the one between Mike and his father before him, and The Senior allows this man to realize that in a way that's quite moving by the end. It's a good thing, in other words, that football doesn't get too much in the way here.

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