While I thought that Team Marco was a sweet family film, The movie begins with the death of Marco's grandmother and then a scene that helps Marco's mom decide that her newly widowed, elderly father, Nono, needs to move in with she and her son Marco. The mother is recently divorced and having a hard time as a single mother of a precocious, often rude child. Generations clash over almost everything such as gluten allergies but especially when it comes to Marco's indoor video game activities.
Nono, who is a bit of a rebel and often argues with both his daughter and Marco, has one thing that makes him happy in this time of grief. He has been playing bocce with a group of his friends for years and after convincing his daughter to let him watch Marco during summer vacation rather than spend money on camp, he takes Marco's video devices away just as Marco is trying to complete a video game that his absentee father created in order to go with him to a video game convention, and refuses to return them until Marco can learn how to play outside and make some real life friends his of his own.
We don't really see the group of kids who become Team Marco until almost half way into the film. We do get to see Marco and his "frenemy" Fred (who pretty much steals every scene he is in) a few times but not nearly enough. The older men are fun and likable enough but we end up seeing a lot more of them than we do of the team of kids that Marco eventually recruits Fred to enlist for him.
There is literally a montage of the kids learning and practicing bocce to establish the team's bonding and sadly, that's it. We don't get much more than a very one dimensional characterization of the bonding and relationship. .
A conflict arises and Marco has to decide what is most important. And while it's a nice moral for everyone in these very "tech" times, it is mostly fluffy, stereotypical, formulaic and flat.
The character of Marco, while well acted, doesn't come off as likable at all. So much so that when you should like him at the end, your just happy he learned a lesson and will now possibly shut up.
I went into this expecting more of a kid team bonding movie kind of in the vein of The Bad News Bears or The Sandlot but that isn't what we got at all.
I'm not sure who the targeted audience is for this movie but if you wanted to hold the attention of kids, you should have had the team get established a lot sooner.
Team Marco should have been titled Team Nono.
