We Are Marshall

We Are Marshall (Matthew McConaughey, Matthew Fox, David Strathairn, Ian McShane, Anthony Mackie) – In some ways, this movie couldn’t completely fail because the story is so compelling.  In the fall of 1970, virtually the entire Marshall University football team was killed in an airplane crash as it approached the airport back in Huntington, West Virginia. Besides being the deadliest sports tragedy in U.S. history, it tore apart this Ohio River town in Appalachia.  Led by a university president who came to believe that the healing necessitated re-fielding a team, the program is taken over by Jack Langyel, a small-school coach who believed in the power of sports healing.  His odd mannerisms and unrelenting optimism galvanize the team, and the movie is less about football than about moving on.  As compelling a story as it is, it doesn’t make Matthew McConaughey a good actor.  He just isn’t.  Two recent movies, Remember the Titans and Radio, featured real actors playing real football coaches – Denzel Washington and Ed Harris – and they are so much better than The World’s Sexiest Man that it’s almost painful.  Thank goodness that the outstanding David Strathairn, as President Donald Dedmon, graces the screen because the rest of the cast is equally unimpressive.  Matthew Fox (from Lost) as Assistant Coach Red Dawson, who went on a recruiting trip and avoided the ill-fated flight, is wooden but appropriately pained.  And Ian McShane (from Deadwood) is miscast as the local business leader who loses a child in the crash and chairs the Marshall board that eventually fires Dedmon.  Why, with all the good American actors, do directors cast British actors in roles like this?  Heck, Huntington, West Virginia, is in the south and in a blue collar area with a distinct accent almost no one tries here, led alone McShane.  The director is McG, largely a video director whose previous movie credits include the awful Charlie’s Angels films.  This must explain how, on the morning of Marshall’s first home game after the tragedy, the coach is still at home as the crowd heads to the stadium and yet still has time to take the team to the cemetery before the game. The movie will garner a tear but that’s due to the story and not the film.  Wait till it’s in the video stores.