Surely it’s a mug’s game trying to make a '30s comedy seven decades too late. That tricky task stymied even the likes of Robert Altman in Cookie’s Fortune and the Coen Brothers in The Hudsucker Proxy, O Brother Where Art Thou and Intolerable Cruelty — all those movies have their merits, but next to the best of McCarey, Hawks and Capra, they’re doomed to come up craps.

And while you’d think starring in those last two — three, if you count the forthcoming Burn After Reading — would’ve taught George Clooney to be wary, he still throws himself at the challenge with all due moxie in his third feature as director, an alternately lively and logy comedy set during pro football’s rambunctious early days in the 1920s. He plays Dodge Connolly, an aging player who makes a last-ditch bid to save his troubled team by enlisting Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski), a star from the much more successful college circuit. The wild card in the mix is Lexie Littleton (Renee Zellweger), a Hildy Johnson type who’s out to get the truth about Carter’s wartime heroics.

That gives Clooney enough points to make a love triangle but he never seems entirely sure whether he’s making a boisterous screwball romance or a scrappy look at football’s coming of age (and subsequent sanitization). As a result, Leatherheads lacks purpose and drive, though the fact that Clooney throws in a brawl or a chase whenever things get too slow suggests he’s got the instincts of an old showman. And even if the dialogue ain’t got half the kick it should, a few exchanges have the requisite snap, crackle and pop. (“I didn’t come here to get insulted,” says a fella who gets the brush off from Lexie. “Oh no?” she retorts. “Where do you usually go?”) Besides, any movie that gets a prematurely crusty reporter writing like a cut-rate Damon Runyan for three paragraphs must have gotten something right.