Good story, subpar movie

Rating: 3/10 (6 January 2020)

Chak De! India is a good sports story that's told in a mediocre fashion. The story is definitely inspiring, even with the obvious cliches included to increase tension. Unfortunately it's not portrayed as well as it could have been. The later film Dangal goes on to deliver the same message while correcting every mistake Chak De! India made, so I highly recommend skipping this movie to watch Dangal instead.
The cinematography was the worst part. It's fairly obvious that the Indian girls are actresses and not athletes, especially when they show the goalies doing anything. The director tries to cover it up by excessively shaking the camera and/or pointing in very bad angles. You can't even tell what's happening on the field, so almost everything shown that isn't a shot on goal just feels like a waste of film and runtime. The music was also chosen poorly, generically underwhelming and occasionally not fitting for the scene.
*Potential spoilers below*
There are tons of details that didn't make sense to me. As a Western viewer, the intro seems completely alien to me that the main character could be considered a traitor for being the only teammate that has any sense of sportsmanship, especially in an international league where the bare minimum expected is exactly what he did. Moving on, man-to-man defense is one of the, if not the, most common defense tactic in nearly every major sport where both teams share a field, so I think it's insane that the India team would not have prepared for that, but the movie goes so far to claim that most of the girls have never even heard of it before. If you take out the man-to-man debacle, then there's no reason at all for the one jerk to even still be on the team after the first week of training. And why does it take 5 entire games (350 minutes of game time) for the enemy coaches to realize the forwards never pass? That should be obvious in the first half of game 1, and that should have been a plot point that resolves in game 2, especially when the highest scoring girl definitely belongs to Australia after that killer first game and their undefeated streak (or at least any semifinal team other than India) while India gets crushed and then wins every game by only scoring 1 point.
A couple of the minor messages are also bad. Sports films are usually focused on personal growth and becoming a better person. The only thing the jerk girl learned was that if you're stubborn long enough, you'll eventually get your way. Also, the Argentina game was horrible. The team plays physically, but only 1 or 2 of the events looked like a foul, and they all looked arguably unintentional. In retaliation, the entire India team, coach included, decides to blatantly foul for the rest of the game with the intention to seriously injure the opponents. The entire message of that game was horrible and appalling, and they should have been kicked out of the tournament for it.