Reviews

Films

We Are Marshall

Directed by McG, starring Matthew McConaughey, Matthew Fox

In most sports movies, it all comes down to the last play - think "running the picket fence" in Hoosiers or Robert Redford smashing out the lights in The Natural. We Are Marshall also relies on this device, putting everything at stake on a final gridiron pass. But this is more than just another football film; this is the story of a town grieving from tragedy that looks to its young athletes for a reason to keep on. Sadly, what should have been a touching tribute to a real-life disaster winds up as an underwhelming exercise in overdoing it.

In 1970, a plane carrying an entire university football team, its staff and a bunch of other townsfolk from Huntington, North Carolina, crashed just before it was about to land. Defiantly, the university decides to persist with its football program and field a team even though they're without players - and a coach. Enter the eccentric Jack Lengyel (Matthew McConaughey), a young coach who rallies enough troops in time for the new season, even though many have never played the game before. With this in mind, Lengyel asks the boys to dig deep for the troubled town.

The story also follows other characters that lost family members, fiancs and so on, when the plane went down. Some are opposed to the team playing again so soon after, making it all the more important that the new recruits put some points on the board. That the film buys into the be-all-end-all success of the team as a remedy to Huntington's ills is an indication of its shortsightedness. Jingoism might be a temporary distraction for Huntington; but We Are Marshall would have been wiser to concern itself with the emptiness that remains once the game is over. Ben Davey

The Descent

Directed by Neil Marshall, starring Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Jackson Mendoza

An A-grade effort bringing a B-grade story to life, writer/director Neil Marshall's The Descent plays just about every horror trick in the book, from things suddenly jumping into frame to desperate women dripping in blood. It's a simple set-up - a caving expedition gone wrong - that quickly escalates into a fight to the death with highly evolved slimy creatures. It's very similar in concept to 2005's woeful The Cave; but if there's one adventurers-battling-against-bloodcurdling-mutants-movie you need to see, it's this one.

A bunch of mid-20s female adrenaline junkies decide to meet in the Appalachian Mountains for a spelunking trip. The journey has an emotional significance because the aim of the exercise is to aid the healing process of Sarah (Shauna Macdonald), who lost her husband and daughter in a car accident the previous year. Unbeknownst to most of the group, they are traversing an unchartered cave system, and after a rock fall traps them in, they must rely on their wits to find an exit. What's more, the cave is inhabited by cannibalistic, humanoid, underground dwellers.

Stylistically dynamic, The Descent is nonetheless chock-a-block full of dumb lines and sub par performances from the all-female (except for the androgynous monsters) cast. Director Marshall (Dog Soldiers) has crafted an efficient thrill-fest that succeeds in creating a claustrophobic and suspenseful tone. But it is silly, almost cartoonish stuff lumbered with superfluous characters who are clearly only there to heighten the bodycount. And there's no prize for picking which scene is a reference to Carrie and Apocalypse Now. BD

(China Daily 11/28/2007 page20)