UNDEFEATED (Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin). 113 minutes. Opens Friday (March 2). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NNN
Full of the kind of clichés that Hollywood normally has to write in, Oscar-winning football doc Undefeated comes across at times like any other crowd-pleasing, underdog sports movie out of Tinseltown. There’s even a subplot that echoes The Blind Side, which itself was a syrupy fable based on a true story.
But the hardened inner-city kids here are far more authentic than anything Hollywood can offer, and as a result the film has a raw emotional weight that commercial features rarely achieve.
Many of the players on the Manassas Tigers, a high school football team in Memphis, are fatherless, and some know a bit too much about the prison system. Their coach is a well-to-do white entrepreneur who devotes as much time to building character among the black players as he does to building a winning team.
The racial politics at play go unmentioned but can barely be disguised. This inspiring coming-of-age tale focuses instead on how some of these kids grow from careless and rowdy to mature and promising the directors have been given intimate access to their vulnerable subjects.
However, Undefeated is selective, looking at only three players whose stories have Oscar gold written all over them. You have to wonder if the tragic tales – the losers from Manassas – were left on the bench for the sake of a feel-good movie.
