Catch the ‘3:10 to Yuma’ - it’s worth the ticket
From over-the-top action director McG (“Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle”) comes a period piece about the serious topic of a school coping with tragedy. While football lends itself well to inspirational and engaging filmmaking, McG clumsily strikes the right cords in this movie, making for a somewhat well trodden story.
While a few characters resonate with persuasive performances, the main character - head coach Jack Lengyel (Matthew McConaughey, “Failure to Launch”) - feels too unreal to be a credible character, thereby dropping the ball in this run of the mill tale.
Marshall University in Huntington, W.V., suffers a major tragedy on the evening of Nov. 14, 1970, when an airplane carrying most of the school’s football team, coaches, administrators, boosters and sports announcers goes down, killing all on-board. Sweethearts are forever separated, and brothers, parents and friends are lost in a heartbeat. The town, the university’s students and those closest to the team are consumed by grief, with all contemplating ending the football program permanently.
A surviving player from the old team rallies his schoolmates to persuade the administrators to rebuild the team in honor of those who died. But how will the school create a new team from scratch if they decide to continue the program?
Some of what made other sports movies like “Remember the Titans” great is found in “We Are Marshall.” Along with music appropriate to the era, there are the inspirational speeches and the internal guilt and friction amongst players and coaches. However, the story just doesn’t hit you the way you would expect it to. The plane crash happens early in the story - so early that you don’t really know who anyone is. You expect the incredible loss of life to be a great blow while you watch, but it doesn‘t achieve that. I blame this on McG not striking the appropriate tone in the story leading up to and after the crash, thereby missing the opportunity to engross and captivate the audience early on.
There are some heartfelt moments, compliments of the surviving player who becomes team captain and from assistant coach Red Dawson - played with appropriate compassion by Matthew Fox (TV’s “Lost”). However, McConaughey’s character never appropriately explains why he is taking on the vacant head-coaching job when no one else would. Coach Lengyel seems aloof, quirky and insensitive to what has occurred at the school, making him an odd choice to put the team back together. Missing the gravitas of a Denzel Washington and spewing mostly clichéd speeches, McConaughey and his character seem all wrong for this movie.
'We Are Marshall' does have some well-captured sports sequences that will get the viewer excited, and David Strathairn’s (“Good Night and Good Luck”) college president feels refreshingly human compared to McConaughey’s coach.
Overall, this is an average sports film that is viewable, though it’s not up to the standards set by the best in the field.
Rated PG for emotional thematic material, a crash scene and mild language.
