'The Boys In The Boat' Review: George Clooney's WWII Sports Drama Aims High, Lands Low

It's been a bad week for underwater movies, between DC's dwarf Aquaman and The Lost Kingdom and the George Clooney drama Boys in a Boat . The two have little in common, thematically or stylistically, but are haunted by the same sense of dark implication.

Clooney's Olympic drama tells the story of young men from the University of Washington rowing team who learn to row to win the 1936 Berlin Olympics, but doesn't focus entirely on the characters or their personalities. Few films, other than pop star biopics, seem clearly created in a laboratory.

What is "Boys in Boats " about?

Set during the Great Depression , "Boat Boys" follows boy and Olympic rower Joe Rantz (Callum Turner) in his pre-sailing days on a boat while in college. The film is based on the book of the same name Daniel James Brown by screenwriter Mark L. When he gets a chance to earn money, he signs up for a grueling test and ends up on the university's underfunded junior team under the strict and strict guidance from trainer Al Ulbrickson (Joel Egerton).

What starts as a job turns out to be a deep passion for Rantz, or so he says, when the inevitable happens that eventually gets him fired from the team. But how much interest or engagement the film manages to inspire in Rantz for this or any other subject seems less like an emotional obstacle and more like a tribute picture. Questions. For example, Joyce (Hadley Robinson), a girl she knew in elementary school, throws herself into the desired romantic subplot. He does not answer, but his indifference or forgetfulness must be interpreted as a lack of commitment, emotion or attitude, as if Joyce is in love with the model.

Turner is talented as he appears in several other projects, including the neo-Nazi horror thriller The Green Room and the 2020 adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma. But things are looking bleak under Clooney's leadership. This makes Rantz the ultimate villain in this type of story, in which individual success creates an eight-person team that moves the action to the German Olympics.

What the team lacks in equipment, Ulbrickson makes up for in raw faith and tough love, driving his students to exhaustion in the name of success. When a question of money (or lack of money) threatens their trip to Berlin, he even organizes a fundraiser to make their lives easier. However, the film is mostly a throw-up and a boost, although the film \u003d \u003d Boys in a Boat is a dreamy and serious work of history.

Egerton may at least have some passion for the subject. That's more than can be said of Clooney's filmmaking, which takes a film about a grueling physical process and gives it the flavor and nutritional value of processed meat.

George Clooney is looking for another World War II story.

Boat Boys' perfect companion is found in Monuments Men , his 2014 drama whose premise and central issues are completely consistent with its predecessor. In "The Monuments Men," a talented cast comes together to rescue stolen art and culture from the clutches of the Nazis, but the film itself has little cultural focus beyond the idea of ​​stealing art back. Although the film's central battalion consists of art critics and curators.

Similarly , Boat Boys is a movie about athletes with lots of rowing scenes, but the concept of rowing itself is boring and disjointed. The action of rowing can appear repetitive and mechanical, but to portray it as such is a failure of the cinematic imagination, as action scenes typically focus on competition, power and suffering. Ultimately, it's a racing movie, but without emotion.

It also looks like a World War II movie, even though it takes place a year before the Pacific War and five years before Pearl Harbor. The Berlin Olympics were presided over by the Führer himself, so his last performance was performed under Nazi flags. But the looming anti-Semitism of the time was not unique in sentiment or tone. The Nazi swastika means nothing to the white characters in the film, and it means nothing to the camera either. It was offered arbitrarily without any conditions or risks - not to mention the slightest suggestion that Hitler was using the Games as a propaganda tool to exclude Jewish athletes.

To show the modern white supremacy, the film uses the name and image of the black runner Jesse Owens (Judah James) and tells in seconds of his struggle at home and abroad. However, this admission is ultimately the death sentence for the film, as it shows how much resistance the boys with the same name give in comparison. To make matters worse, the film's story ends up being very fragmented and disjointed, with Rantz only appearing as a background character in the climactic scenes despite being the main character for most of the film. - Planning. Meanwhile, the movie turns into a completely different character, as if the Boat Boys were always his story.

It's a puzzling narrative choice, with Clooney seemingly drawing from his famous (and far greater) influences.

"Men in the Boat" aims high, but lands low.

From the opening scene - where an aging Rantz looks at a book of modern rowers before thinking about his own life - there is a palpable feel to the film, and composer Alexandre Desplat brings this nostalgia to life with his stunning score. The film has the hallmarks of a glory drama of the 80s or 90s, whether it's the horror war movie Saving Private Ryan , the historical sports epic Chariot of Fire or the coming-of-age drama Deadpool .

But what makes these films so successful is the dynamic and lack of camaraderie. Although it has a complex design, it never feels like living in reality. Poverty is dark, but no one seems desperate or malnourished. Shoes with holes are often seen - especially when Ulbrickson comes across his team's shoes in the dressing room and realizes how bad they are - but they are treated as noise, fixed and scrutinised. Clean accessories, no dirty or torn clothes. Ulbrickson does not have to overcome his child's disgust, discomfort or ignorance, or his self-pity.

It's a film that looks brilliant at rest but feels misleading when viewed as a whole, a deceptively entertaining piece of direction that leaves little to explore or conquer. He has no perspective, or at least nothing that the camera can't get from standing medium close-up portraits where the characters go long stretches without reacting to anything. It's completely empty, and given the importance of its aspects and composition – working class boogieing records and competing with each other in a dangerous time and place in history – a group would be offensive in the process.

How to watch: Bot Boys hits theaters on December 25.

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