I recently watched another sports movie called "The 5th Quarter" that is based on an inspirational true story. I have to admit that before watching it I hadn't heard of the movie. Although this movie won't make my top 10 best sports movies ever, it delivered a great message and evoked a lot of emotion from everyone that watched it. In my mind, any movie that brings out that much emotion from me is worth watching and worth recommending to others.
The movie had some things that I really like and some things that really bugged me. Some of the things that bugged me were in the details and probably bugged me more because I played college football. For example, they would show a locker room conversation where the players were wearing their white (away) jerseys and then show them coming out to the field in their black jerseys. The crowd shots that they showed were not always consistent with the game that they were playing because they would show a day game and night crowd shots or home crowds for away games. The other small thing that bugged me was that the actor (Ryan Merriman) that played Jon Abbate looked way too small in football pads.
The biggest things that bothered me were the details about some of the periphery characters that were completely ignored. There was a car accident full of high school kids and it doesn't tell you what happened to any of the kids in the car except Luke Abbate. The movie is about the inspiration of Luke Abbate but some information about the other kids would be helpful. Most of the time when you watch movies based on true events it provides a summary of where everyone is currently at and what they are doing now but this movie didn't provide it for any of the characters. I also thought that some of the additional characters in the movie were not very well developed.
The things that I liked about this movie actually outweigh the things that I didn't like. As I mentioned earlier, I liked the emotion that it brought out in me and the inspirational message that it conveyed. I actually loved the fact that it used actual game footage for some of the football scenes. The reason I like this is because no matter how hard you try, you just can't make fake football look like real football and it emphasizes that this really happened.
I think this movie would be a great movie to show to teenage kids to show the consequences of bad decisions and to show how pulling together as a team and as a family can overcome real adversity.
I have a copy of this movie that I would like to give away so if you would like a free copy of this please leave a comment and let me know. If I get more than one comment I will randomly choose a winner.
Saturday, October 1, 2011
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