My level of interest in a movie about rowing crew was vanishingly small… but this one is set around the 1936 Olympics so I figured it was the wetter version of the Jessie Owens story. And close enough… at least the boys in the boat weren’t elitist snobs.
So, yeah, a bunch of working stiffs compete to join the Washington university rowing crew. And they compete and compete some more and then go off to Germany to show old Adolph what for.
It’s a tough ask to get me to care about row boats and this film didn’t convince me. It’s a little tedious, a little long, and very lazy in its supposed inspirational moments. It doesn’t work particularly hard to get me to care about long skinny boats with dudes working too hard too fast. Apparently it’s a challenge to make such races visually engaging. It seems the only real drama comes when a boat suddenly goes faster. Must be the Nos kicking in.
That said, the film’s final showdown in Berlin was pretty decent. The director finally figures out how to make row, row, row your boat more interesting. They kind of add some extra camera movements, shifting back and forth between the moving rowers and the static shouty guy in the back of the boat (the coxswain).
They also use a shortcut: cutting between Joel Edgerton as the US coach and literal Hitler watching the German team with concern. I guess I should argue its cheating throwing in a literal Hitler for us to boo hiss at since we learn nothing about the German team.
But we also barely learn anything about the American team either. Only Callum Turner gets any attention… and I mainly wound up thinking if they ever rebooted Captain America and wanted to stick with a Chris Evans type, they have their man. Not sure that was the intended take-away of the movie though.
This flick starts interesting and gets real slow in the middle… to the point in the second big race where I was hoping we wouldn’t have to go to the Olympics and sit through this stuff again. But we did and it got better. I’m giving the movie a decent rating but it was very close.
Score: 75