Over rated

Rating: 2/10 (25 January 2004)

I saw this movie a month after it came out and only saw it because of all the hype about it saying that this was one of the best movies ever. After I was done watching the movie, I was left wondering if I had seen the same film.
First, the movie is way too long. The first half hour or so is a boring preamble about the Great Depression. Everyone who has had high school history knows what the depression was like, so we don't need a narrator to remind us! I remember looking at my watch several times during the movie wondering when the movie would actually start.
Second, although the actors in the movie are very good, the material that they are given are not. We are supposed to root for Tobey Macquire and Jeff Bridge's characters, but they are both so pathetic that I couldn't make myself feel empathy for them. The best performances in this movie were given by Gary Stevens, who is a professional jockey and not an actor and the horse who plays Seabiscuit, who is in fact a HORSE. Perhaps it is appropriate in a movie like this that a horse upstages the lead actors, but I would have expected Jeff Bridges and Tobey Macquire to put up a little more effort.
Finally, I didn't like the movie because it was framed like a history channel documentary. The movie has a narrator and the effect of the narrator being there was that I felt that I was watching some kind of afterschool History Channel documentery rather than watching these great events unfolding. The narration made the action so much more stale.
Perhaps I am the only person in the world who didn't like this movie. There is and was so much hype surrounding this film that people seem to have lost track of the fact that it isn't that good. It would be a shame if the movie wins any awards.