Is it because I'm not British that I think this movie was awful?

Rating: 2/10 (15 February 2010)

With the Olympics going on, I decided to have my girlfriend and I watch this classic. I am someone who loves true story movies, loves old classic movies, and loves movies that build their characters over time.
But this movie, in our opinion, lacked plot structure, a point, any sort of climatic instance, any drive, and any real love for the characters.
For those of you who plan to see this movie, this is a summary of what we saw. The two main characters are Eric Liddel and Harold Abrahams. They both are honorable characters (honor being the only point of the story) who both love to run and are quite good at it. Both want to be in the Olympics. For most of the movie you hear about how Liddel is a great runner. Every ten minutes you will see him run a race, races which are usually pointless. Between each race scene there is about ten minutes of British banter and young British men running around in their polo shirts and scarves talking about politics and the weather. Throughout the whole movie, you see Abrahams on the sidelines. He hardly ever races. He just sits around flirting with some actress or talking about running.... but not doing any of it. It's apparent that he wants to prove that he's better than Liddel, which gives some tension to the movie. However, they never race aside from the beginning of the movie. The movie ends with him racing without Liddel in the Olympics because Liddel is a Jew and won't run on the Sabbath (honorable and understood). Liddel wins other races without Abrahams.
There's nothing I can tell you about these characters other than that the two main characters are honorable men who like to race. Their love interests were hardly seen nor talked about. Abrahams girlfriend just popped up now and then for a kiss and that was about it. There was no point to the love relationships. I didn't identify nor really see any reason to care about the main characters. The movie spent so much time talking about nothing and, in the end, amounting to nothing.
Maybe it's because I finally saw the movie almost 30 years after it's release. But as I stated earlier, my girlfriend and I both love classic movies. We aren't the sort of people who really like Michael Bay films or any other films that rely on special effects, sex, and violence. This movie was done with taste, but incredibly boring taste. I saw more plot structure in an insurance seminar than in this movie.