"Well, we're way past big speech time."

Rating: 7/10 (25 November 2007)

This is a sweet, gentle fairy tale, full of nice writing and subtle performances. The good kind of sports movie, it mostly allows the game to serve as a tool of the story. If the end is not difficult to guess, still it is a thrilling emotional journey. This is quite a trick with a handful of clichés as your plot points; but pros can pull it off, and there are many jobs well done on this production.
The photography is in a lovely muted palette, and the design is exquisite. The Midwestern landscape has rarely been quite so Norman Rockwelled by a movie. The games look like old Life Magazine Ektachrome prints come to life. The town and especially the school are straight out of the American collective memory.
Barbara Hershey is complex and fascinating; the ball players break your heart; Gene Hackman wisely does not try to be likable, instead bleeding loss and hope from his scuffed leather jacket. My dad always liked Dennis Hopper as a wasted father figure - "Rumble Fish," "True Romance," "River's Edge," this - so it's hard for me to fault "Hoosiers" for trading shamelessly on the inherent melodrama of the situation. The relationships are economically revealed, conservatively developed, and satisfyingly hokey without very often becoming unlikely.
There are only two things really wrong. One is the "Airwolf" synthesizer score that crashes in the 50s heartland like a flying saucer on crack. Two is the equally dated easy-out of a series of montages instead of a third act. Come on. That's using condiments as food. Because of this hurry, several scenes in the second hour are more scaffolding than story.
But when it's good it's very good, which is most of the time; more often, I think, than David Anspaugh's other Sports Underdog Who Achieves Momentary Greatness movie. I mean "Rudy," not "The Game of Their Lives," which I'm not likely to see because I'm an American and could care less about real football.