Here’s your inspirational, based-on-a-true-story sports movie for this week. It’s a good one, too. Set in drought-ridden western Oklahoma during the Sixties, BELIEVE IN ME is about a young basketball coach who comes to a small-town school believing that he’s been hired to coach the boy’s team. Instead, he’s given the girl’s team to coach. The girls have never been successful and are neglected by the school’s administration, but the coach sets out to change all that.
All the typical elements of a movie like this are in place, right down to the coach’s supportive wife and the villainous head of the school board. It’s all beautifully photographed and well-acted and mostly predictable, but there are a couple of nice variations on the usual plot near the end that make this movie better than it might have been. Bruce Dern proves that he can be just as slimy and evil as a school board president as he was playing a psycho outlaw on GUNSMOKE or in John Wayne movies. Well, he’s not quite as evil here as he was in THE COWBOYS, I guess . . . but he’s still plenty despicable.
All in all, BELIEVE IN ME is a fine entry in the sports movie genre and worth watching.
All the typical elements of a movie like this are in place, right down to the coach’s supportive wife and the villainous head of the school board. It’s all beautifully photographed and well-acted and mostly predictable, but there are a couple of nice variations on the usual plot near the end that make this movie better than it might have been. Bruce Dern proves that he can be just as slimy and evil as a school board president as he was playing a psycho outlaw on GUNSMOKE or in John Wayne movies. Well, he’s not quite as evil here as he was in THE COWBOYS, I guess . . . but he’s still plenty despicable.
All in all, BELIEVE IN ME is a fine entry in the sports movie genre and worth watching.
1 comment:
Bruce Dern is a fine actor. He's always been good at playing the most villainous of scoundrels. I first became aware of him in the film Black Sunday, based on the Thomas Harris novel. Which, by the way, is where I first became familiar with him.apbzwms
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