MOVIE REVIEW: We Are Marshall

MOVIE REVIEW: We Are Marshall (Richmond Times-Dispatch)

BY DANIEL NEMAN
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER

The brilliance -- the only brilliance -- of "We Are Marshall" is that it tells the story of the 1970 plane crash that killed nearly the entire football team and coaching staff of Marshall University from a completely unexpected angle.

Anyone else would tell the story of the last, fateful year, and end with the terrible crash. You would tell it that way. I would tell it that way. Any writer in Hollywood would tell it that way.

But first-time writer Jamie Linden had a different idea. He thought it would be far more inspirational if the story began with the crash, showed how it devastated the college and the town, and then showed how the healing began with the team's rebuilding.

What a great idea. But it's the only good idea in the film.

The director, McG, ruins everything by turning up the heat too high. He overdirects, his actors overact and the dialogue is overwritten. Everything about this picture is too gloppy.

We know we're sunk from the beginning, when an injured player is listening to a radio broadcaster saying "Next week is a must-win," and the player solemnly intones "They're all must-wins, chief." A minute later, we see Matthew McConaughey trying to tune into the distant game on his radio, and just as he picks it up his kids race into the room and laughingly bowl him over.

Oh, isn't that just unbelievably heartwarming?

McConaughey plays the half-crazed Jack Lengyel, who becomes the new coach for the new team. McConaughey strains so hard to be charming that he comes across as frightening and weird, and the constant stage business with his hands seems affected rather than realistic. He may be the star, and the story may be about his character, but the movie is better when McConaughey is not in it.

But the fault, dear reader, lies not in our star. It is the self-consciously named McG -- he of the not-at-all-bad "Charlie's Angels" and the all-bad "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle" -- who takes what could have been a good movie and artlessly pounds the life out of it.

McG has always been a man of, shall we say, few ideas, and he tends to do the same things over and over. In this film, he seems particularly infatuated with light streaming in through windows, with hand-held cameras, with close-ups and with a focus that shifts from one character to another. As always, he punctuates his story with inappropriate popular songs regardless of their meaning or connotations.

His facade of competence often slips, revealing the hack that lives within. The most hilarious of these slips comes in a kick-off, in which the ball is kicked in the daytime and caught at night. That's the kind of hang time that will get you into the pros. Then there's the time David Strathairn (as the strangely weak university president) gets rained on in Kansas City and is still wet back in West Virginia. And the way the radio announcer refers to the Xavier University Pirates (dude, they're the Musketeers).

The story of the Marshall University football team is one that deserves to be told, true. But it deserves to be told well.