Some of the actors add some extra depth, including Michael Chiklis as Bob’s assistant coach and Ser’Darius Bain as one of the Spartans’ three notable black players. The characters themselves, alas, are as thin as cardboard. When the Game Stands Tall is morally earnest and sincere, with characters who talk about things that matter. Now I need a coach, and all I’ve got is a lame dad.” Perhaps if he’d ever watched any sports movies, he might have seen that coming.īob’s son Danny (Matthew Daddario) reacts to his father’s brush with mortality with disconcerting selfishness: “You’re gonna coach me next season, right?” Bob’s wife Bev (Laura Dern) assures him that “Danny’s just angry because he wants a chance to know you.” But when Bob tries to connect with Michael on a personal level, Michael whines, “The whole time I needed a father, I got a coach. Then he has a moral epiphany: He has been a lousy husband and father. Like many movie coaches, Bob is so committed to his work that he neglects his family, at least until a life-threatening crisis forces him to step back from coaching for a while. Studious and soft-spoken behind spectacles, Caviezel plays Bob not so much as a coach but as a moral authority, one whose mission is not winning games but forming youths to be good men. Of course, the paradox at the heart of the sports-movie genre is that the game is its raison d’etre, yet most sports movies want to be about more than just the game.įor Jim Caviezel’s Bob Ladouceur, it’s not about winning or even how you play the game it’s about character, commitment and brotherhood. The gridiron action is authentic-looking and exciting (or so it seems to this non-fan), though the bone-crushing sound effects become more pronounced the longer the movie goes on. Under his leadership the Spartans went undefeated for a dozen years, from 1992 to 2004. Thomas Carter, who directed the 2005 basketball movie Coach Carter, brings his game to the story of Bob Ladouceur, who coached football at De La Salle, a San Francisco area Catholic high school for boys in the Diocese of Oakland. Not many people openly embrace the famous remark, widely if erroneously ascribed to Vince Lombardi, that “Winning isn’t everything it’s the only thing” - but when your team goes over a decade without losing a single game, racking up more than 150 consecutive victories and 12 state championships, winning can become something more pernicious than “the only thing”: It can be taken for granted.
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