Maudlin film falls short

Rating: 5/10 (29 December 2006)

If you like your sports films extra maudlin, then you'll love "We are Marshall". In 1970 almost the entirety of the Marshall football team, coaching staff, and many football parents and boosters were killed in a plane crash while returning from an away game. It was a horrible tragedy and the school nearly decided to kill the football program. But due to the urging of the remaining players and students, the program was given a reprieve.
Enter spunky, gonzo coach Jack Lengyel (Matthew McConnaughey) who wants to keep the program afloat. To do so, he enlists the help of assistant coach Red Dawson (Matthew Fox), the lone surviving coach who is resistant to return to coaching. Dawson has profound guilt--he gave up his seat on the doomed plane to another coach who wanted to return home to see his daughter--as well as the sadness at the loss of all his players, staff, and friends. Powerful men like college trustee Paul Griffen (Ian McShane), who lost his son in the crash, want to see the program die a quiet death. Griffen's son was to marry cheerleader Annie Cantrell (Kate Mara) and after her fiancé's death, she becomes devoted to caring for and grieving with Griffen.
This is all well and good and the first half hour of the film gives you great hope for its potential. Once Lengyel arrives, the movie takes on a gonzo energy and we are treated to a fun montage of player recruitment and early practices--standard sports movie fare. But then this energy is sapped as the film engages in another hour and a half of grief. The characters and townspeople don't change, evolve, grow. They just wallow and we have to watch the whole thing.
Good films can be made about a failure to come to terms with tragedy (see the fantastic "In America". If you haven't, rent it now. It'll floor you.) But "We are Marshall" with its steady stream of sports film clichés and thin characterization doesn't have the machinery to pull it off. I was fully ready to forgive the movie its clichés. I like sports films even many of the lesser ones. Rising above adversity and winning just makes for good cinema. But "Marshall" fails under the weight of a script that runs in circles.
If you stick around through the closing moments, though, you will be treated to a truly inspiring epilogue. By keeping the football team going, Lengyel paved the way for a program that would have great success in the future. Kate Mara, a very good performance in an underdeveloped part, recounts this success in a voice over and it's the most inspiring moment of the film. You want to admire the film because it's ultimately about the importance of perseverance, but the movie is too bathetic to win the hearts of viewers.