We Are Marshall
When Jack Lengyel (Matthew McConaughey) arrives at Marshall University in 1971, he thinks his job is to rebuild a football team. All but three of the players had perished with their coaches in a plane crash the prior November.
When Jack Lengyel (Matthew McConaughey) arrives at Marshall University in 1971, he thinks his job is to rebuild a football team. All but three of the players had perished with their coaches in a plane crash the prior November.
But when he reached the West Virginia campus, Lengyel found that first he had to rebuild a community shaken by survivor's guilt and sorrow.
Based on a true story,
alternates between Lengyel's inspirational platitudes and gridiron action. Because the new athletics hire has to be life coach to the grief-stricken campus and coach to the green recruits he dubs the "Young Thundering Herd," the film is emotionally affecting without being particularly distinguished.
As directed by McG,
is a vast improvement over
, though as in that film the filmmaker relies on a pop-music soundtrack to give Marshall a pulse. McConaughey tucks into the role like a hungry man gobbling a ham sandwich. His period sideburns and tomato-red polyester jackets often upstage his own broad acting. Anthony Mackie delivers a sensitive performance as a player who was not on the ill-fated plane, the student who leads a rally to save football for Marshall.
The film gathers momentum in its final third, when Lengyel delivers a speech about it not mattering how his team plays the game, only that it plays. It's a most effective mechanism for priming tears, further proof that men who resist feelings in most areas of their life have no trouble crying at sports movies.