A Great Sports Movie!

Rating: Null/10 (6 December 2006)

I'm not a big sports fan except for hockey but even though this is a basketball movie I just loved it.
Not a big Gene Hackman fan either but he was fantastic as the coach and Dennis Hopper was also very good as the alcoholic who gets another chance as the assistant coach (and father of one of the team's players). The plot is great.
Basically Hackman is a coach who was banned from college coaching for hitting one of his players, he's a very serious and angry coach who only cared about winning. He gets another chance at this small Indiana high school that only has six or seven players total on the team. The town though is huge on basketball and really wants to win.
They try to get rid of the coach because they don't like how he's coaching (in one game he only puts four players on the court after he doesn't like how one is playing and benches him). In the end though the players believe in him and want to keep him, then they end up making it all the way to the championship game against one of the state's biggest schools as huge underdogs.
You just end up pulling for the team and the players the whole time so even though it's pretty formulaic for a sports movie it does it very well, it's a great sports movie that's great for the whole family.