We Are Marshall

Posted by Neil Miller (neil@filmschoolrejects.com) on December 22, 2006

In We Are Marshall, the dubious tandem of Director McG (Charlie’s Angels) and actor Matthew McConaughey team up to relive the story of the 1970 Marshall University football team that was lost in a plane crash coming home from a game against Eastern Carolina. The deaths of 75 players, coaches and boosters was a devastating blow to the University and the community around it, leaving many to wonder whether there would ever be football again at Marshall. The result is a poorly managed, severely miscast walking sports clich©.

Enter McConaughey as coach Jack Lengyel, a man who sought out the opportunity to help Marshall get back on the field and teach an entire community to keep on living. Full of inspiration and annoying quirks, Lengyel reassembles the program with the help of Red Dawson (Matthew Fox), the lone coach left after the tragic crash.

Seeing as this has been built up as one of those standard inspirational football movies, it is easy to expect and to forgive plenty of sports movie clich©s. From the eccentricity of the head coach, played awkwardly by McConaughey to the rising score that precedes a very calculated dramatic moment, the filmmaker does not shy away from these clich©s, but rather embraces them, all to the displeasure of anyone watching.

Matthew McConaughey provides a jittery eccentricity to Coach Lengyel which is meant to show energy and enthusiasm, but more or less resembles someone who is walking around with their pants on too tight. As much as this may excite female viewers, it does nothing to help the film along. His accent is also a bit suspect, Lengyel was from Ohio, but McConaughey delivers a dialect somewhere between Knute Rockne and George W. Bush. Matthew Fox is also a disappointment with a distant and timid dramatic performance, culminated by his almost laughably bad crying scenes. His strength is in being a strong character, and it shows in his poor performance as a man whose will is almost depleted.

Another problem occurs in the fact that the filmmakers attempt to squeeze inspiration from an otherwise depressing story. The film falls into the trap of not giving the audience enough action to offset the overly melodramatic plot points. Films like Friday Night Lights and Remember the Titans did well by the audience, taking time out from plot development to show some good ole’ smash mouth football action. The football action here is severely over-the-top, something that we have come to expect from McG as a director (see any of the Charlie’s Angels flicks). It was as if he wanted to be able to screen the film with his friends and be able to say “See, look at these cool action sequences.” As cool as they may be in his mind, they just don’t fit the tone of the film.

In the end McG is almost able to sell these subpar performances set against this less than inspirational film, but his ego and his flair for the dramatic put this one to bed. While not a complete waist of time, We Are Marshall is certainly not going to give you anything more than 2 hours of Matthew McConaughey in really, really tight pants.

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