Movie Reviews
The director of We Are Marshall goes by McG. Its a stylish pseudonym, but Im going to be honest, if you are going to put Directed by McG at the very end of a movie like We Are Marshall, you might as well just put Im super cool, and so is my name!
McG made somewhat of a name for himself in the music video industry before crossing over into feature films with the Charlies Angels movies. With We Are Marshall, the director adds a bit of human interest to the plate. Heres a film with a dynamite premise, based a truly heartbreaking story, told with sensitivity...for about thirty minutes.
On the way back from a game, the entire Marshall University football team and coaching staff (minus three) are killed when their aircraft crashes in bad weather. The moments immediately following this are excellent by movie standards. Confused parents and fans line the streets as rumors quickly spread that their beloved team is gone. Upon reaching the actual crash site, a recovered Marshall roster verifies the citys worst fears.
As the school counts its losses, it doesnt take long to scuttle plans for the next season. Continuing the football program would be, as most see it, inappropriate. But a remaining group of inspired seniors rally the town to the doorstep of a board meeting, at which time they raise their arms in unison and yell We are...Marshall! The gesture inspires a search for a new head coach. But no coach in their right mind is willing to build a team from scratch in such a short period of time. Theres a predictable phone call montage in which David Strathairn asks numerous coaches to take the job.
Marshall eventually gets a call from Jack Lengyal (Matthew McConaughey), a young football fanatic in search of just such a challenge. When introduced to the city, hes welcomed by uncertainty and a lot of despair.
The search for team members takes a newly-selected coaching staff to different sporting arenas, where they happen to find a soccer player who kicks too hard and a baseball player who tackles for home plate. Lengyal tries to mold this mishmash into a team, but the journey to victory proves just as hard as everyone said it was going to be.
Here is a movie that, in a lot of ways, infuriates me. On one hand, were served some great scenes. Theres a wonderful sequence when Lengyal and his assistant coach, Red Dawson (Matthew Fox), travel to a nearby college to ask the head coach for a look into his play book. The head coach not only says yes, he lets them scour the entirety of their game films. Soon after, as Lengyal and Dawson view the film, its pointed out that the home football teams helmets are garnished with tiny crosses in Marshall colors. The moment is tender and appropriate.
But on the other hand (the larger hand), we have to sit through scenes like the one I mentioned before when the town shouts We are...Marshall! Aside from it being totally contrived, it creates an awkward continuum factor where the scene needs to end, but cant without disrupting the rhythm of the chanting.
This constant imbalance transforms the movie from a drama to a simple dichotomy of nothing more than good scenes and bad scenes. McG is not a confident filmmakers; he relies heavily on grainy style and muddy sound effects to distract our eyes and ears from his bad judgment. What begins as a searing tragedy about a passionate, talented college football team tragically falls into the realm of every other football movie ever made. **