''Judging from the film, the main setbacks he encountered were his team's crushing loss to France in the 2007 Rugby World Cup (the subject of national hand-wringing in New Zealand, but not an incident whose emotional impact travels) and playing with a broken foot during the World Cup in 2011. Chasing Great makes that look easy.
''Too little time is spent on strategy, Mr McCaw's style of captaining or his apparent skill for tiptoeing up to the edge of the rules.
''We do learn about his habit of writing notes to himself before a game (be calm, clear and decisive, enjoy, just play) and the pressure he felt to go out with a win. But even fans, the only conceivable audience here, already know how that turned out.''
The Film Journal's Frank Lovece was astounded at how little McCaw earned compared to top US athletes.
"One of the more interesting aspects of the film is how much less even top rugby players make than their American football counterparts,'' he wrote.
"While the film doesn't get into it, one newspaper account says the NZ$750,000 a year McCaw and one other player each earned around 2010 made them the country's highest-paid rugby pros.
''We see a little of McCaw's house, and while it's certainly upscale, it's no blinged-out McMansion."
Lovece said McCaw "would be the classic All-American boy were he not New Zealand born-and-bred", and goes to pains to explain that the All Blacks is not a racist team name, comparing it to the Boston Red Sox baseball team.
He says the film's universal story of overcoming odds through determination and hard work, combined with the "surprising elegance of the rugby-match sequences, in which the famously brutal sport achieves a weird grace of almost basketball-like ball-handling," mean Chasing Great might be a hit with an audience interested in a "sports documentary about something beyond the usual sports."
