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Some true stories turned into films arrive so loaded with thrills and gravity, you wonder how they haven’t become a movie before. Others spend their running time proving exactly why not. And then there is George Clooney’s The Boys in the Boat, a film that feels like the latter, despite being the former.
The subject is the University of Washington rowing team of 1936, who competed for the US in the Berlin Olympics, lining up against Germany in front of Hitler. You may rightly feel hooked already. But the grip of the filmmakers is so uncertain that you come to doubt if there is drama enough even to reach the finish line.
That shouldn’t be a question. At the centre of the film is a classic David and Goliath with the heft of real history. With the Depression still haunting America, the “U-Dub” team we see assembled two years before Berlin is filled with hard-up freshmen, none more so than Joe Rantz (Callum Turner), a lone-wolf kid stuck haunting soup kitchens. For coach Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton) meanwhile, his whole sporting life has been spent in the shadow of the Ivy League. Now, though, he pioneers a primitive form of sports science: his goal to make eight human bodies mimic a racehorse, on water.
So then: a crackle of class friction; characters pushed to their limits and beyond; a solid performance from Edgerton; a still better one from Turner. All to the good. Yet the stakes feel bafflingly low. As often happens when Clooney steps behind the camera, the movie is clearly keen to be seen as grown-up. (Set the Alexandre Desplat score to rousing.)
But compared to the exertion on screen, the result can just feel stuffy. You want it either to go bigger or smaller, explode into the epic or draw you into close-up. Instead, the film stands at a polite distance and proceeds at the same unvarying pace. You leave wondering whether Clooney would know a real underdog if one took a nip out of his ankle.
★★★☆☆
In US cinemas now and UK cinemas from January 12
