We Are Marshall
Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures Distribution
Rated: PG
Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Matthew Fox, David Strathairn, Ian McShane, Anthony Mackie
Director: Joseph McGinty Nichol
WorkNameSort: We Are Marshall
Our Rating: 3.00
When a plane carrying the 1970 Marshall University football team crashes, killing pretty much the whole squad and coaching staff, the resilient surviving players persuade the college’s president to hire Coach Jack Lengyel (Matthew McConaughey) to rebuild the team out of almost exclusively freshmen. Now, if this sounds like inspiring stuff, that’s because it is; like this year’s Glory Road and Invincible and a couple dozen other true sports movies, We Are Marshall offers hope, a solid cast and plenty of manipulative melodrama to make you cry. It doesn’t really matter that you’ve seen variations of the story time and time again. What matters is, you’re not going to have a terrible time.
This article appears in Dec 20-26, 2006.