I didn’t go into My
All-American expecting great things.
The trailer made the film seem like a pretty stock-standard,
sports-centric rise to glory tale cashing in on the star power of Aaron Eckhart
as the coach in order to support the no-name main cast. And all of these things are true, but there
is so much more to this film: it is a steaming pile of shit. Out of respect for other moviegoers, I needed
to restrain my laughter at how inept and awful this film turned out to be. This goes beyond being merely formulaic; it
hits all the standard plot beats of a sports movie without understanding the
emotional weight that needs to back them up, which makes for awkward and
unintentionally hilarious cinema.
Ostensibly based on a true story, My All-American follows the meteoric rise of college football
athlete Freddie Steinmark. He never won
the All-American title, but he is remembered fondly by his coach and teammates
as being smart, dedicated, and a lot tougher than his small stature would lend
credit to. And this is pretty much the
film’s key failing: Freddie is too damn perfect. He doesn’t exhibit any sort of character flaw
that would lend him some humanity, like he’s Captain America but without a
narrative that pushes against his blind idealism. Even when Freddie is diagnosed with fatal
bone cancer and told that his leg will need to be amputated toward the end of
the film, he takes the news with a grim certainty that he will be fine in the
end. This makes him an incredibly dull
character and thus all conflict in the film feels entirely meaningless.
But what really makes this film so riot-worthy is the
incompetent direction that barely holds all its working parts together. Characters come off as flat and token, as if
the actors are reading cue cards from just off-screen. Even Eckhart can’t seem to give more than
half a shit with his performance, which could have been a lifesaver in a sea of
talentless hacks. This may have a lot to
do with the script, which is peppered with clichés and Hallmark moments that
range from cringeworthy to sidesplitting.
My favorite culmination of these various idiotic factors is when Freddie
is trying to teach his roommate how to pray, and the roommate looks down at his
hands as if he just cannot figure out how to clasp them together. All of this is stitched together through the
language of training montages and period-topical references that feel as
artificial as they are hackneyed.
The only saving grace of this film is that director Angelo
Pizzo clearly knows how to shoot football plays, which begs the question of why
his talents aren’t better put to use by one of the major television networks on
Sunday afternoons. This film could be
called amateur at best, but is more likely the result of lazy writing and an
over-reliance on the likeability of its protagonist. But a protagonist doesn’t need to be simply
likeable, but also relatable, with actual struggles that he is actually
STRUGGLING to overcome. Instead, this
film gives us a messianic figure who can do anything and came to a tragic end
through no fault of his own, but its narrative is wrapped in such an
accidentally comical presentation that what little character the film had going
for it cannot be taken seriously. This
is a film that deserves a drinking game, but definitely not the cost of your
ticket stub.
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