Makes little sense, and yet...

Rating: 8/10 (19 July 2001)

I've never seen a sports film where I understood the sports footage less. How are points scored in this kind of football? Are there goals? Are there goalposts? (I didn't see any, but the action was all in extreme close up; I didn't see anything much.) Does one score by simply placing the ball on the other side of one of those lines? Must one PLACE it over the line? Is throwing allowed? Is kicking? What's the difference between those who play "offence" and those how play "defence"? And as for tackling - when is it allowed, when is it forbidden? What does it achieve, anyway? Are there penalties for fouls? What form do they take? Who's winning? How can you tell? What the HELL is going on?
And you know, it's truly amazing how little my ignorance mattered. They may as well have been playing some now lost Babylonian game - although such a game would probably be more comprehensible to the average modern viewer - for all the sense it made, but for once I didn't care. This is the kind of film that gives slickly made, manipulative, fascist sentimentality a good name. I loved it - even though I meant it when I said "fascist". If the football camp failed to look like something Mussolini might have designed, that's just because the Italians were much more laid back. (I suspect even the Hitler Youth were more laid back.) But, well, you know ... there was all that stuff about crossing racial barriers, so somehow the nastier elements of the story didn't seem to matter such a great deal. I suppose it's because the film, more than most of its kind, was willing to acknowledge the underside. Boone got his job by unfair means. He was brutal and arrogant. He won the adolescents to his side by methods that could easily, in another context, have made our blood run cold. Yet because the film made no great effort to deny any of this, or to hide it, it didn't leave the sour taste it might have. We were free to concentrate on Boone's one redeeming virtue: he was the only character who was unracist from the very beginning. (Actually, he's much less of an actual character than half a dozen other people in the movie - he's more a symbol, a mechanism of change. This is just as well. I suspect it's another reason why his virtue weighs so heavily with us.)
"Cool Runnings" is a far superior Disney sports film (more humane, less mechanical), but this one somehow leaves just as warm a glow.