‘Do Your Job Part 2’ is worth your time, even if you hate the Patriots

There is more than one reason that Do Your Job Part 2, a film about the New England Patriots’ run to Super Bowl LI, exists. Yes, first and foremost, it is chum to feed to a ravenous Patriots fan base, that will, en masse, record this and set to “keep until delete” on their DVRs. (A film like this is basically fetish pornography to someone from Saugus, Mass. or Rye, N.H.)

But even if you aren’t a Patriots fan, there is something to gain from watching a film like this. There are lessons to be gleaned here: lessons about myth-making and the rewriting of history, as well as ones about team management and image management, and, yes, about the fine art of spewing bullshit.

It is all there.

The hour-long special aired first on Sunday night of Labor Day weekend on NBC and will be replayed this Wednesday on the NFL Network. It follows the same basic narrative structure of the original Do Your Job, which highlighted the Patriots’ run to a Super Bowl XLIX win over the Seattle Seahawks.

This film is not nearly as good as the original, it must be said, but sequels rarely are. The original took the theme of “do your job” and spun a narrative out of the idea that each and every member of the Patriots organization was responsible for the Super Bowl win by virtue of doing his job well. It was a bit trite, sure, but for the most part it worked.

Each guy had his story to tell, his tiny addition to the overall, which all resulted in Malcolm Butler picking off Russell Wilson at the goal line. That, combined with the drama of Deflategate — which they actually discuss, at length, in the original film — made the whole thing work as a narrative. Or at least as much as a Patriots Super Bowl highlight film can work as a narrative.

This time they don’t really have that structure, or really any structure at all, to fall back on. The filmmakers introduce the idea of “hills” early on — we see the Patriots running up one repeatedly — and come back to it again and again, with the basic argument being that because the Patriots ran up a hill a few months ago, it gave them the endurance to outlast the Falcons in that wild second-half comeback. Which, I mean, I guess? I think it helped them a lot more that they had the greatest NFL quarterback of all time throwing the ball than any hill they might have run up, but then again, I’m no NFL expert.

With nothing much going on storywise, what’s left is basically a rundown of each of the Patriots’ playoff games, with a long time focused on that second-half comeback against the Falcons.

So, you’re probably asking: If I’m not a Patriots fan, why should I watch this?

The unstated promise of these films is the chance to get the inside scoop — that little bit of football knowledge you couldn’t possibly have unless you hear it from the coaches. And there is a little bit of that for the Xs-and-Os lovers of us out there.

You get Belichick showing how the Falcons were playing man and jamming up the middle of the field for Tom Brady and Co., which led to a second-half adjustment of having the receivers running hard cut-back routes on the outside. You get Patriots resident guru/geek Ernie Adams pointing out how it looked like Julio Jones had trouble cutting off his injured right foot in the NFC Championship game, so the Pats cornerbacks tried to play him heavy on his right side during the Super Bowl, daring him to cut left. (And then you find out that Julio Jones is not a human being, and it didn’t make any difference at all.)

You get defensive coordinator Matt Patricia explaining how Dont’a Hightower lined up extra wide to confuse the Falcons running backs, which allowed him to get to Matt Ryan for that pivotal fumble that changed the game.

You also get a lot of bullshit. Like, droves of bullshit. You get convoluted coach-speak and oversimplifications and tidy narratives. You get Bill Belichick saying, “I felt like we had control of the game. We just didn’t have control of the score,” which makes so little sense that even Edward Norton, the reverent narrator of the film, has to crack a joke at it.

You get the story that winners tell themselves.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In the context of a football game, it’s actually a useful exercise to see how history gets written by the winners. Take, for example, the much-publicized fact that Belichick had, sensing a high-scoring game, ordered up more than the usual number of two-point conversion plays ahead of the Super Bowl. It proved genius, as the Patriots needed two (and then used a third one on the final play) to win the game.

This story conveniently excises all the other stuff the ever-neurotic Belichick probably dialed up the week before the Super Bowl. He might have become convinced there would be a need for nine onside kicks in the game and had some poor coaching assistant draw up 31 different onside-kick combinations, one of which involved the kicker pretending to have a heart attack on the field just moments before kicking the ball to a surprised defense. We don’t know, though.

That stuff all gets left out, because it doesn’t make him look like a genius.

(We’re also totally excluding the Falcons from any part of this narrative at all. For all we know, poor Dan Quinn had 55 different two-point conversion plays drawn up for this game. Reams of two-point conversion plays. A library of them.)

I know it’s silly. Of course it’s silly. It’s sports. None of this really matters, like, at all. But that’s what’s so helpful about a film like this. We can see how outcome shapes narrative in a more-or-less stakes-free environment. Belichick’s two-point-play fixation appears genius, and it’s something Patriots fans will tell their grandkids about. And if they had lost, no one would give a shit.

For me, the movie is at its most interesting when a character is randomly interjected into the narrative. Dion Lewis, who was eclipsed in the Super Bowl by fellow diminutive ball carrier James White, gets a special shoutout early in the film. Later, player personnel whiz Nick Caserio gets, like, five minutes of discussion.

It’s not hard to guess why. Lewis, who is still on the Patriots, may have felt overshadowed in that final game. Caserio, who has worked in player personnel in years, was not, as I recall, featured extensively in the first Do Your Job film.

Even in a film for mass consumption, Belichick and the Patriots only seem concerned with one audience: the team. The team is all that matters; it is the end all and be all of their universe. Belichick will allow the gaze of the public, briefly, and take his curtain call, but never at the expense of what he’s trying to do, or at what’s coming down the road. He demands that Lewis and Caserio get that screen time, because he will not jeopardize, even for a moment, their commitment to the next season. I can’t tell if this is admirable or sad. I guess it’s both. It’s on to the next one for Bill Belichick and the Patriots. Even when taking a victory lap, there is a job to be done.