Nicholas Galitzine and Ray Nicholson in The Mosquito Bowl. Photograph: Kane Skennar/Netflix ©2026 View image in fullscreen Nicholas Galitzine and Ray Nicholson in The Mosquito Bowl. Photograph: Kane Skennar/Netflix ©2026 War films Review The Mosquito Bowl review – Netflix mixes football, war and cliches in slick by-the-numbers saga Peter Berg’s handsomely made second world war drama about a football game before the battle of Okinawa is stirring but filled with eye-rolling dialogue
Adrian Horton Thu 29 Oct 2026 18.37 CET Last modified on Thu 29 Oct 2026 20.32 CET Share Prefer the Guardian on Google F orgive me, but it is difficult not to be a little cynical about The Mosquito Bowl, Peter Berg’s grimly serious action feature situated (and marketed during many an NFL game) at the intersection of two predominant male interests: football and the second world war. Though both are certainly rich topics for cinema, and though I have been a fan of many a football/war story – most especially Berg’s NBC series Friday Night Lights – it is, let’s say, a tricky time for movies filled with dubiously nostalgic patriotism and masculinity. The trailer practically drips with a borderline parodic virility: a cadre of handsome up-and-coming male actors streaked with dirt; a group of men “trained for glory” and “called to war”, triumphantly hoisting aloft footballs, beer and guns to ponderous music.
Read more But Berg is a capable and battle-tested director who knows his way around both a clock-ticking thriller ( Deepwater Horizon , Lone Survivor ) and the football field. So while The Mosquito Bowl, adapted for Netflix by Berg and Mark L Smith from a nonfiction book by Buzz Bissinger, fulfills its promise of American male pablum – there is many a clunky monologue about honor and duty and the “white buzz” of adrenaline – it also delivers on competently made, absorbing action sequences. (In huge news for Friday Night Lights fans, the football scenes here are once again scored by Explosions in the Sky.) Both in sport and in war, Berg has a knack for grace within visual cacophony and chaos; graphic sequences in battle and from the 1944 Christmas Eve pickup game at Guadalcanal that gives the film its name suggest, far more than its anvil-heavy dialogue, the connections between the gridiron and the battlefield, how the fleetness and camaraderie of sport can be wielded for survival and killing. There is a stomach-churning catharsis in experiencing, as in Sam Mendes’s 1917 or Alex Garland’s Warfare , the real-time brutality and capriciousness of war.
That is, if you can stomach the rest of it. Every sepia-toned off-field scene, with the boys being boys or with their token supportive girlfriends, is liable to prompt an eye roll, such as when the Wisconsin Badger Bob Baumann (Bill Skarsgård) quotes Jack London’s The Call of the Wild from memory. Or when a shirtless Anthony “Touchdown Tony” Butkovich (Ray Nicholson, who inherited his father’s wild eyes but less of the magnetism), proclaims that “New York City’s the biggest goddamn bull I known of, and I intend to ride the hell out of it” in a sweaty locker room. Or when John “Mac” McLaughry (Nicholas Galitzine) waxes poetic about how playing football “feels like magic” in a romantic bathtub scene with his girlfriend (Ella Newton) – who, of course, can only compare such flow-state nirvana to the feeling she gets when she has sex with him. Or when Dave Schreiner (Jeremy Allen White lookalike Tom Francis), the most gro…