Heart of Champions
A standard-issue sports movie on the hoity-toity pastime of rowing wastes the talents of Michael Shannon.
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The challenge with sports movie is you have to care, on some level, about the sport being played. I’m not what you’d call a superfan of football or baseball or hockey, but I’ve seen good movies set in those worlds. I had at least enough knowledge and investment in those sports to give a fig about whether the teams won or lost and an idea how they did it.
But rowing? Otherwise known as crew? Where a bunch of rich white dudes oar a pencil-shaped boat down a river?
C’mon, man.
I tried to get invested in “Heart of Champions,” a generic sports movie with a generic title, and just couldn’t. I thought the movie had a shot because it stars Michael Shannon, one of the most interesting film actors today, in the lead role of the coach.
But he’s well wasted in a story that hits all the same cliched beats we’ve seen in every sports movie ever:
A team in crisis, either because they’ve never won or because they always won and lately started losing.
A new, grizzled coach with a checkered past is brought in to change their fortunes. Everyone is initially P.O.’d by his unconventional tactics.
Newcomer(s) to the team struggle to fit in but eventually reveal themselves to be the heart of the group.
Strife between the team members as they fight over individual glory vs. the team success espoused by the coach.
Powerful parents of a player and/or financial boosters get involved, demanding the coach’s head on a platter after misfortune.
The final big win.
I think the film’s biggest problem, other than following the formula so slavishly and being centered on a ridiculous sport, is that the members of the crew don’t really stand out in any way. It seems like a standard group of young college guys, predictably played by actors who look like they last saw university in the aughts.
(The main three actors are 29, 30 and 31, respectively.)
There’s Chris (Charles Melton), the aforementioned newcomer, who’s only rowing to keep his scholarship and has a Dark Past. Alex (Alexander Ludwig) is the team captain and chief bully who wants everyone to knuckle under and carry him to a berth on the U.S. Olympic team. John (Alex MacNicoll) is the goofy carefree one who learns to shoulder the burden of leadership.
The rest of the crew? I couldn’t even tell you their names. There’s the dweeby little guy who doesn’t pull an oar but just sits in the back and yells at the people who do. We also have Mohawk Guy and Glasses Guy. I swear you could’ve swapped them out with different background players halfway through the movie and we wouldn’t notice.
Shannon plays Jack Murphy, a former member of a championship team from the fictional Ivy League school who’s brought in to coach. A Vietnam vet clearly struggling with PTSD, Murphy wants the men to avoid the mistakes he made when he was their age.
Shannon gives the role a sort of twitchy charm, playing Murphy as a hardcase who still cares about the team as individual people. He won’t even let them practice on the water initially, and they try out odd methods meant to teach a lesson like rowing blindfolded or asking Chris, displaying me-first obstinacy, to try and steer the boat solo.
Then the movie wanders a mile deep into the swamp of romantic stuff, because of course it does. John is with Sara (Lilly Krug), who used to be with Alex, so there’s some obvious conflict there. Chris gets drunk and acts super creepy toward Ish (Ash Santos), a smart exchange student from England, so of course she soon starts all moony toward, because that’s how real women behave.
I can’t say as the rowing stuff exactly lit my fire, but when the movie switched over to the ooey-gooey scenes, it was all dead water.
“Heart of Champions” was originally called “Swing,” referring to a rare fugue state rowers go into when they’re in perfect harmony, and underwent a very late title change for its release. I don’t think it helped, as this film fights to stay afloat.