Reviews

This movie probably seemed like a great idea in pre-production. "Let's make a movie about one of the greatest and most controversial athletic coaches of the modern era! And let's cast Brian Dennehey as Coach Bobby Knight!" That's where this movie went terribly wrong. Why cast an actor who bears no semblance of the man he's portraying? And then, why let this actor turn his character into not Coach Knight, but Brian Dennehey in a red sweater? As I sat watching this movie on ESPN, I didn't find myself believing this man was actually Coach Knight. He didn't look like him, talk like him, act like him, or even walk like him. I could not get past this fact, and thusly, I could not enjoy the movie. When Paul Newman and Robert Redford were cast as the outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, we didn't care if they were accurate historical models of their true characters because most of us had never even heard of these men until we saw the movie. But, with someone as visible in today's media as Coach Knight, you have to do better. When Anthony Hopkins was cast as Nixon, it was the same situation. But, Anthony Hopkins made us believe he in fact was Nixon. Dennehey didn't even try. What might have been a great movie was turned sour by this. Besides the fact that this movie tried to do for the four-letter word what "Saving Private Ryan" did for dismemberment, it stunk. Too little of the real Coach Knight and too much profanity for the sake of shock value turned this movie into a "season to turn off half-way through the broadcast." The only good thing about this is that it was television movie. I didn't have to waste my hard-earned money on this piece of trash.

I hate it when movies insult the audience's intelligence. This is what happened in this movie. I was really enjoying this movie until they went to spring training. Lakeland, Florida, is the spring training home of the Detroit Tigers and in this movie, it's your typical pristine Florida coastal town. Except, in real-life, Lakeland is smack-dab in the middle of Florida, about as far away from a sandy beach as you can get in the Sunshine State. I know. I grew up not thirty miles from Lakeland. My high school used to play their high school every year in all sports. Lakeland had the closest Best Buy to my hometown so I always would make the drive to pick up the latest CD or DVD I just had to have. I mean, don't get me wrong, I think it's great that Polk County finally made it to the silver screen, but come one people, let's get it right. This totally runied the movie for me. I'm a history major. I want things done right. This movie was mediocre at best. What could have been a great movie was turned bad by a large helping of melancholy mixed with sentimentality. Just once, I'd like to see the protaganist get to the airport and find the lover had indeed flown the coop. This movie could have been a Sosa-homerun over the bleachers and through a window on Waveland. Instead, it was just a lazy Raphael Furcal pop-up to the second-baseman.