Mark Reviews Movies: HEART OF CHAMPIONS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 28, 2021

Casting Michael Shannon, that great character actor capable of such simmering intensity, as the inspirational coach to a ragtag team of self-absorbed student athletes is an act of either genius or folly. He's too good an actor to play this sort of well-trodden role in the way we've come to expect.

Any filmmaker making a generic sports drama about overcoming the odds should probably be concerned that Shannon might be too good an actor to even bother doing anything with this role. In theory, a part this clichéd is beneath him, but the good news for director Michael Mailer and Heart of Champions in general is that Shannon is a great actor. That means he's actually going to do something—and something different—with this role.

The major difference is that Shannon's Coach Jack Murphy doesn't quite seem to want this job. It's not that it's beneath him or that he finds these college athletes to be hopeless. It's simply that the guy has seen a lot in his life, having served in the Army during the Vietnam War, and the personal problems and sporting ambitions of a bunch of privileged Ivy League rowers aren't exactly going to make him lose any sleep.

This coach is here to do a job, and he's going to do it as well as he can. That's it, and yes, we can almost sense Shannon's approach to the role coming through in the character himself.

Shannon's fully invested performance as a coach who's generally dismissive but specifically professional is the best thing in Mailer's movie, which begins and progresses with just about every dramatic beat we've come to anticipate from this kind of story. Vojin Gjaja's screenplay doesn't teach us much about collegiate rowing, give us a sense of these characters beyond whatever melodrama they can create amongst themselves, or provide us with lessons beyond the usual.

Teamwork can help accomplish the impossible. No individual person is an island. Practice and hard work can pay off, as long as you also put your entire heart into it. You know these axioms, although Gjaja actually has characters say some of them in this movie, as if they're revolutionary thoughts. Well, coming from Shannon's coach, they at least have a little bite, being vocalized by a man who knows they're as trite as can be.

The story is set in 1999, and a university's crew team has just lost the national championship—snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by some animosity between the guys. Before the next season begins, Chris (Charles Metlon), a transfer student with a secret tragedy that is revealed piece by piece for manipulative effect, joins the likes of team captain Alex (Alexander Ludwig), who wants to join the Olympic team and whom the rest of his teammates quietly despise, and John (Alex MacNicoll), who is a real leader and currently dating Alex's ex-girlfriend Sara (Lilly Krug). It's not a lot of conflict, but the filmmakers certainly milk all of it for much more than it's worth.

The new coach arrives, shakes things up a bit, pushes the team to its individual and collective limits, offers some words of encouragement, and gradually gets all the rowers to set aside their differences for the common good of winning the championship. There's little more to say about the practice/competition side of the story, since it's exactly the typical flow of an inspirational sports drama (Mailer's use of close-ups inside the boat does give us a sense of how trying and tiring the sport is). It is worth noting—yet again—that Shannon brings a level of lived-in sincerity to Murphy, which at least gives the assortment of clichéd pronouncements and setups a little authenticity.

A good chunk of this story, though, is devoted to the personal lives of and interpersonal conflicts between Chris, Alex, and John. The first has an awkwardly introduced and developed romance with Nisha (Ash Santos), which inevitably takes a bad turn on account of an easily corrected misunderstanding. As for Alex and John, their battle is over Sara, and to call the climactic incident of that fight, which puts the championship in jeopardy, overwrought would be an understatement, considering the number of coincidences, contrivances, and intentional or accidental mix-ups needed to arrive at that terminal encounter.

Heart of Champions certainly doesn't know what to do with the unnecessary tragedy it has invented, except to let it be a minor stumble on the way to the Big Match. As it turns out, one unique performance and a convoluted peak to some melodrama don't alter a generic sports movie's existence as just that.

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