We Are Marshall has honorable intentions. But it's so dull!
   It doesn't help that, like many films based on true stories, anybody with a memory or the ability to Google knows how this sports drama turns out. So there's no surprises, no buildup, no excitement. And, after the compelling opening scenes, nothing much happens.
   Here's the situation: It's 1970. West Virginia's Marshall University is playing East Carolina University (Greenville, N.C.) in football. Marshall loses, much to the dismay of just about every radio-listening resident of Huntington, where the university is picturesquely located. The team, after a thorough chewing-out by Coach Rick Tolley (who points out that "the only thing that counts is winning !") boards a plane to fly home. The plane encounters bad weather just before landing and crashes, killing the team members, coaches and university staff members, the crew and a handful of Marshall boosters.
   The town is understandably devastated, and there's powerful resistance to rebuilding the football program. Then a new coach shows up, full of compassion, determination and spirit, to take on the job.
   The outcome of this setup would be predictable even if it wasn't a matter of public record. So the audience must rely on performances in order to make the price of a movie ticket worthwhile.
   Here's what you get:
   Matthew McConaughey as Jack Lengyel, a bold, innovative coach from Wooster, Ohio, who takes on the task of making something like a football team out of three surviving members of Marshall's Thundering Herd and a bunch of freshmen nobody else recruited. (The NCAA granted Marshall special dispensation to play the otherwise ineligible freshmen). Garbed in loud period plaids and sporting a strangely plastered-down hairstyle, McConaughey seems to be channeling Peter Falk in full Columbo mode here, right down to the head tilts and body language. Even so, he still looks like a football coach. (Were the movie not rated PG, he'd probably sound like one, too.)
   Anthony Mackie as Nate Ruffin, a player who wasn't on the doomed plane and who struggles to get the Thundering Herd up and running. Mackie is a perfectly competent actor. But although he's only 27, he looks like a grown-up. Every time the camera fixes on his mature face, it reminds us this is a Hollywood movie with pretty people play-acting. It's especially distressing because Ruffin is crying for about half the time he's on screen.
   Ian McShane as Paul Griffen, boss of the Huntington steel mill and a big shot on the university board of directors whose son is among the players killed in the crash. McShane's vast talent is wasted because Griffen, who starts out as an angry, wounded and vengeful character who wants to suspend the football program, runs out of steam about the time the movie settles into the safe, familiar patterns of an overachieving underdog story. If an outright triumph by Lengyel and his band of undersized warriors isn't supported by history, then director McG will settle for a moral one.
   Some of McShane's character arc was likely lost on the cutting room floor. Too bad, for although the football action is competent, there's way too much of it in a film that insists the game isn't so important as the people who play it. Good intentions count for something, but We Are Marshall is a forgettable film about a team that deserves to be remembered.
   

We Are Marshall C- Cast:
Matthew McConaughey, Matthew Fox, David Strathairn, Ian McShane, Anthony Mackie

Director:
Joseph McGinty Nichol (McG)

Rating:
PG for emotional material, crash scene, mild language

Running time:
127 minutes

This story was published Friday, December 22, 2006