At first glance ‘We Are Marshall’ comes across as the soppiest sports movie ever. But, on closer examination one can relate to a situation, where turning up on the field is in itself, victory. And for a university that lost its entire football team, coaching and support staff in a tragic plane crash, turning up took a lot of tears to be put aside.
The story begins exactly at the opposite point, at a time when nothing other than victory mattered for the ‘Thundering Herd’. In losing this team the University and the town of Marshall, lost the spark in their lives, a reason to smile and a reason to believe that the athletic program needed to be continued. With the efforts of a few surviving members of the team, who could not be on that ill-fated flight and the persistence of the President, the program is continued with. After many a luckless interview, Jack Lengyel, an odd man who walks in an odd way and says odd things takes up the challenge of building this team from scratch; a challenge that many before him have turned down.
Facing severe talent shortage, owing to competing schools, he gambles with a strategy of building the team with freshmen, something that needs the Dean to get special permission from the NCAA. He picks freshmen from baseball and basketball and builds a team that he calls the ‘Young Thundering Herd’ (a great lesson in positioning). But the road to being a competitive team is filled with emotional pot holes, with the scar of loss still very fresh in the minds of the players.
It takes a while to get used to the mood of this film. Usually sports movies are about redemption and often have a subtext of personal or professional drama underneath, which finds its resolution in a sporting finale. The first half of the film is spent in the sorrow of loss and only in the final quarter of the story, does one see the hope that many a sports film seek to inject into the audience. Many of the exchanges between the principal characters fail to evoke the underlying emotion that they carry and the build-up is tepid.
Having said that, the on-field sequences and the climax is very well choreographed and shot by director McG, of Charlie’s Angels fame. Here he makes a film with more heart and substance and manages a passable version of what could have been a deeper exercise.
Mathew McConaughey as Lengyel does inject some life into the film with a seemingly studied character portrayal of a real person. His efforts are sadly not matched by many of his co-actors, barring David Strathairn as the President and that does not help the cause of the film.
‘We Are Marshall’ is a true story with a lot of steel in it, but the silver screen version has more tears.
