We Are Marshall: Movie Review, DVD Review, HD DVD Review, Blu-ray Review (2007)

9/06/2007 Posted by Admin

We are not impressed

(Originally published 2007)

In the right hands, "We Are Marshall" could have been an insightful, moving drama about the difficulty of getting on with life in the wake of a horrific tragedy. Its studio, Warner Brothers Pictures, thought this was the case, so they sent out awards screeners to the Academy and to critics groups in hopes that votes would be favorably cast and nominations would ensue.

And they just might, though likely only for the Razzies, since what Warner has here is a cliched, predictable sports movie with cloying inspirational overtones whose mangled execution sends it to the far end of the playing field, where it drops the ball.

As directed by McG ("Charlie’s Angels"), this overly earnest, melodramatic movie follows the residents of Huntington, W.Va., after the Nov. 14, 1970, airplane crash that killed 75 people, including 37 Marshall University football players, eight of its coaches and many supporters.
The film is about a town coming to terms with those deaths and with a university president, Donald Dedmon (David Strathairn), who was forced to acknowledge that the town’s residents might be caught in a haze of mourning if he didn’t find the means to start a new team.

He did so in the face of great opposition from some members of the community, who believed that creating a new team was disrespectful of the dead, but also with great encouragement from many members of the student body, who believed that carrying on with the tradition of a football team was the only way to respect the dead.

Wary of the former but fueled by the latter, Dedmon set out to find a new coach, with his exhausting efforts leading him to Jack Lengyel, who is played by Matthew McConaughey as if the actor has been struck dumb by a brick. His dim turn as Lengyel suggests caricature, not character, a man whose unfocused, caged energy is meant to be endearingly quirky, but which really is distractingly cartoonish.

The film fares mildly better with Matthew Fox as Lengyel’s assistant coach, Red Dawson, and with Anthony Mackie as Nate Ruffin, one of the original team’s few surviving players. But working against them is a sorely miscast Strathairn, who often appears blinking and bewildered by the fate handed him, and especially Ian McShane, who is wasted in a two-dimensional role as a bitter, grieving father of one of the dead football players.

Since "We Are Marshall" only ever plays by the rules of the genre, there are no surprises here — none. It’s a movie that leans hard on its hit-heavy soundtrack of popular music and as such, it just coasts, following its rote story of how Lengyel and Dawson had to take a scrappy, underdog team and turn them into winners in spite of the odds stacked against them. Who wants to guess how that turns out?

For those interested in seeing a good, recent football movie, rent the just-released "Invincible" with Mark Wahlberg instead. That movie lifts this overdone genre in ways that "Marshall" sandbags it.

Grade: D

(Also available on HD DVD and Blu-ray disc)