PREMIERE.COM'S MOVIE REVIEW (posted 12/27/06)

2006 has had its fair share of bizarre performances. The short list includes Danny Huston's glassy-eyed outlaw guru in The Proposition, Fiona Shaw's absurdist appearance in The Black Dahlia, and, most recently, Tobey Maguire's laughable attempt to be a badass in The Good German. But in terms of sheer What-The-Hell-Was-That!? shock value, nothing beats Matthew McConaughey's star turn in We Are Marshall. As Jack Lengyel, the coach who faced the Herculean challenge of rebuilding Marshall University's football program after most of its players and coaches perished in a plane crash in 1970, McConaughey combines the physicality of Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now with the cadences of Jon Stewart's George W. Bush impersonation. It's truly something to behold and the other actors appear to be as confounded by McConaughey's antics as the audience. Even poker-faced character actor David Stratharin (Good Night, and Good Luck) has trouble maintaining his composure whenever his co-star is around—it's almost as if he's concerned that this crazy man will break character and attack him the moment he turns his back.

We can only speculate why McConaughey chose to play the role this way, but in all honesty, it's a good thing he did. His loony performance is the only surprising thing about this otherwise paint-by-numbers inspirational drama, the third based-on-a-true-football-story to be released in '06 following Invincible and Gridiron Gang. Directed by McG, the man responsible for both Charlie's Angels movies, We Are Marshall never misses an opportunity to yank on the heartstrings. In fact, the first big emotional moment arrives before twenty minutes have elapsed, when the surviving players rally the townspeople to stand outside the university on the day that the team's fate will be decided. Their job? To chant "We are Marshall!" at the top of their lungs, thus showing the school's president Donald Dedmond (Stratharin) and the board that it's not too soon after the tragedy to bring football back to the small town of Huntington, West Virginia.

In order to carry on with the program though, the "Thundering Herd" are going to need a new leader. That's where Lengyel comes in. A relatively inexperienced coach, he volunteers and sets about rebuilding the team from the ground up, while doing his best to honor the men that came before. Another part of the challenge is trying to win over the people that aren't happy he's come to town, including Paul Griffen (Ian McShane), the father of one of the dead players, and Red Dawson (Matthew Fox), the former assistant coach who is still wrestling with guilt over having given up his seat on the doomed plane to another man. Their doubts aren't assuaged by Marshall's first game of the new season, which the team loses in humiliating fashion. If they are defeated a second time, Lengyel knows that his career will be over before it's really begun.

It would be easier to tolerate the movie's mile-wide sentimental streak if McG seemed genuinely interested in exploring the confusing mix of emotions that follows a horrible tragedy. But instead, he reduces the drama to a set of standard-issue cry points that we've seen numerous times before. Whenever McG does seem on the verge of making an emotional breakthrough, he cuts away to yet another montage scored to '60s and '70s-era rock chestnuts like Creedence Clearwater's "Looking Out My Back Door." Not surprisingly, the director seems most comfortable with the on-field action, although the game sequences pale in comparison to those in the genre's current standard-bearer Friday Night Lights (the movie and the TV series). The story of how Marshall University and the residents of Huntington "rose from the ashes" (as the film's generic voiceover intones) is inspiring. But the film version isn't. —Ethan Alter