
It’s rare that a movie about sports is actually very good. For every “Hoosiers” and “Rudy” there are countless bombs like Caddyshack II, The Air Up There, and Rocky V.
Movies about sports are usually terrible because the production company has to find good actors who are also good athletes.
This is harder than it sounds because in high school; the people on stage for the sophomore production of “Twelfth Night” are very rarely the same people receiving varsity letters for wrestling.
Because of this challenge, sports movies often tip in one of two directions; well acted films filled with overly choreographed, turbocharged sports montages (The Blind Side) or believable action sequences tastefully rendered against a backdrop of acting makes the “Mighty Ducks” look like a shoe-in for the Palme D’or.
“The Cutting Edge” anybody?
On the outside chance that a casting director can find someone with the ability to act AND punch at Hilary Swank levels, they still have to pair them with a good director and a great script… which only guarantees that a picture can still be as bad as “He Got Game”.
Which is why I didn’t go see Moneyball when it hit theaters last fall.
It didn’t help that I didn’t have a good feeling about the actors involved in the movie.
When I found out that Jonah Hill would be starring in a movie that wasn’t supposed to be funny, I figured I’d skip it, because I saw a movie where Jonah Hill was trying to be funny and it turned out to be “Evan Almighty”.
When you couple that with the understanding that there are only two kinds of Brad Pitt movies;
A.) Constantly eating snacks and taking his shirt off movies
“Ocean’s 11-13”, “Troy”, “Fight Club…”
Or
2.) Making women cry movies
“Meet Joe Black’s Legend of the Tree of Buttons…”
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