I saw George Clooney’s “The Boys in the Boat” a few weeks ago via screener link, and it doesn’t really work. It’s very conventional. One might easily use the word “vanilla” to describe this film and you’d get a good sense of its overall vibe.
Directed by Clooney, this is an old-fashioned film following the University of Washington’s rowing team, who went on to compete at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. The film is being touted as an “inspirational” story following a group of underdogs at the height of the Great Depression as they are thrust into the spotlight and take on elite rivals from around the world.
The themes throughout the film — friendship, turmoil, determination, races, love interests — have been tackled in better, more fruitful films. It’s all simplified to the nth degree by Clooney.
“The Boys in the Boat” is based on Daniel James Brown’s non-fiction bestseller. The problem with this adaptation, which, on-paper, sounds like an interesting story, is that the whole thing i blandly shot by Clooney. The look of the film is rosy and glossy, reminiscent of ‘90s Oscar bait. It could use some grit.
The character development is also fairly stale. You don’t get much of a sense of who these boys are or where they come from. Callum Turner is flat as the young lead here — Joel Edgerton surprisingly delivers a dull performance. There’s no ambition — from the performances, to the cinematography to the storytelling to the direction.
Clooney’s snoozing direction is partly to blame, but so is Mark L. Smith’s bland screenplay which uses sports underdog clichés to tell its story. You can guess almost every beat of the storytelling. There’s nothing you cannot predict in this 120 minute film.
I liked Clooney’s earlier films as a director (“Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” “Good Night and Good Luck,” “The Ides of March”), but as of late, he’s been struggling behind the camera with such duds as “Leatherheads,” “Suburbicon,” “The Monument’s Men,” “The Midnight Sky,” “Tender Bar” and now this one.
As you might have noticed, the embargo lifted on the film. “The Boys in the Boat” has a 48 on Metacritic and 46 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.