Wick's Review

Summary - Really Great 4.5

Arguably the best football movie ever, We Are Marshall is about much more than sports. Don’t shy away because 75 people – including dozens of collegiate football players – died in the horrific plane crash that forms its centerpiece. The movie is about what led up to the tragedy and mostly about how the team, the school and the community picked themselves up afterward.

The crash itself is over in a flash, like a band-aid ripped off a wound. Only this flash opens a wound, one almost too big to comprehend, too big to overcome.

American spirit rises to the challenge, at least as this “true story” Hollywood movie would have it. In any case, the movie can be seen as a portrait of how we Americans like to see ourselves: tough and fair and neighborly, and crazy about football.

Don’t like football and all it stands for? Here’s guessing you’ll still like – maybe even love – this movie. Love football? Gotta see We Are Marshall.

Acting - Great 4.0

Two Matthews – McConaughey & Fox – ably anchor the movie as their real life counterparts did the team.

• McConaughey uses his moviestar charisma to good effect as eccentric coach Jack Lengyel.
• Fox does well with self-effacing leaders, here as in Lost.

Their wives impress less, though a January Jones sighting is always welcome, this one just before she became Mad Men’s Mrs. Don Draper.

• David Strathairn underwhelms as the University President.
• Ian McShane – as the magnate atop the Trustees – never fails to impress. Pity that this guy spent the vast bulk of career in the UK. At least we Yanks get him in this All American movie.
• Anthony Mackie appears a credible football player while delivering on his trademark moral centeredness, as he did in The Hurt Locker.
• Kate Mara, granddaughter of football royalty, naturally does a great job as a cheerleader bereft of her football playing fiance.

Film - Perfect 5.0

A beautiful, masterful film from start to finish, WAM establishes a palpable sense of place right out of the gate (“a steel plant next to a river with a school next to it”), then establishes a sense of time with Mustangs, transistor radios and listening to a game on the car radio, ’cause that was the only way to listen to it.

Time and place established, it introduces characters who feel flesh-and-blood, and that we know are going to die. Then it pushes through that to show how the survivors in the town and school go on to thrive.

It does all this without ever becoming mawkish. Beautiful and masterful.

Edge - Tame 1.4

Tame yes, but with a monstrous tragedy at its center. Oh yeah, and with ample good, clean football violence.

Reality - Natural 1.0

Impressively realistic football, with practices and games playing out in all their controlled chaos, organized violence and martial glory. The practice scene when Coach Lengyel demonstrates how to “Headslap the shit out of him” captures the football dynamic as well as it can be done.

Cheer and you’re a football fan (probably a former player). Feel repulsed and you’re not.

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