George Clooney has often dipped his toes in the directing pool, faring better critically with his smart political-media dramas, Good Night, and Good Luck and The Ides of March than his previous sports movie Leatherheads.
Here he helms a decidedly ordinary adaptation of a supposedly incredible real-life story about how a novice college rowing crew ended up representing the USA at the 1936 Olympics.
It’s based on the bestselling historical novel by Daniel James Brown, about how the working class University of Washington crew went up against the Ivy League teams.
Tall blond Joe Rantz (Callum Turner from Fantastic Beasts) is poor – sleep-in-car, hole-in-boot, soup-kitchen poor – but he’s driven by the promise that once he’s enlisted into Coach Al Ulbrickson’s (Joel Edgerton) team, Rantz will earn a wage that enables the dedicated engineering student to stay in school.
Pretty soon, it’s your standard story of commitment to training, a burgeoning teen romance and the secret tribulations of having an absentee father – the clichés ticked off one by one without eliciting a sniff of emotion or audience buy-in.
It’s a boon for Australian actor Edgerton to get top billing, except the cast is full of young white men and bit-part women whose job is solely to look cute, be supportive and listen to mansplaining about the intricacies of rowing.
Only in the long-awaited third act do the well-shot rowing scenes feel exciting (if predictable), but you’d have to be a big fan to find this film engrossing. While it’s touted as a remarkable true story, Clooney’s movie is as basic and clichéd as triumphs-over-adversity movies can be.
Rating out of 5: ★★½
The Boys in the Boat directed by George Clooney is in cinemas now.
