Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Boys in the Boat’ on Prime Video, a snoozer of a sports saga directed by George Clooney (2024)

This week on What The Hell Is A Coxswain Theatre is The Boys in the Boat (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video), the George Clooney-directed saga of the University of Washington men’s rowing team that overcame some big, fat odds to win Olympic gold in 1936. And so this film is a true novelty: A BOATS (Based On A True Story) movie with actual boats in it. Clooney’s track record as a director has been a bit clenched-teeth-emoji for, well, going on two decades (I will say The Ides of March was generally somewhat memorable!), and coupling that with the thought of watching another hooray-for-the-underdog-sports-team drama leaves us a bit underwhelmed. But there’s always hope that we’ll be sufficiently whelmed, so let’s find out where this one lands on the whelming scale.

THE BOYS IN THE BOAT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Soft horns. Flutes. Golden-hour lighting. Alexandre Desplat. Clooney in the credits. Period drama. Enough period-specific browns and tans to make the Sahara look like an LGBTQ flag. Look out people, this is a PRESTIGE picture! We see an old man peeling an apple. Why? Because he’s hungry, duh. He’s Joe Rantz, and as he pares fruit he remembers all the way back to the mid-1930s, when he was played by Callum Turner and was padding his hole-in-the-sole shoes with newspaper. The Great Depression is in full swing. Joe lives in a shantytown, sleeping inside an old abandoned rusty automobile. He studies engineering at the University of Washington, and just when we start to wonder how he affords tuition, we get a scene in which a woman tells him he needs to pay up or get expelled. “Maybe a part-time job would help?” she says, and Joe calmly responds, “I’ve been looking,” instead of saying what he should say: “In THIS economy?!?”

It’s not for a lack of trying. Joe wants a job, but the job board is full of old, dead leads and he’s being shut out here and shut out there. What’s his story? His mom died when he was a kid, and his dad vamoosed in search of work, leaving 14-year-old Joe to fend for himself. Now he’s fruitlessly trying to bootstrap it – but at least he has a distraction in his classmate Joyce (Hadley Robinson), who totally throws herself at him, reminding him of the time in elementary school when he had a crush on her and smiling wide about three inches in front of his face. He’s into it, but he plays it cool when any normal fella would be losing his poop. Which says a lot about his character: Joe’s not a normal fella. His hard life has rendered him highly pragmatic. Extreme poverty will do that to a person.

Joe catches wind that guys who make the U-of-W rowing team automatically get a job and a real bed to sleep in. And that means Coach Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton) has to choose his humble eight-man junior-varsity squad from dozens and dozens of guys who line up for tryouts because they’re a lot like Joe With Holes In His Shoes. Of course, Joe makes the team, among a handful of nearly anonymous supporting characters in this movie – there’s the guy with the face, and the guy who can play the piano, and the one guy with the haircut, and they all row real hard. This is when we finally learn what a coxswain is: the guy who steers the boat and straps a megaphone to his face so he can yell things like ROW FASTER and ROW EVEN FASTER at his team.

Notably, Joe is not the coxswain. He’s one of the other rowing guys. That’s not a technical term; this movie isn’t big on the details of a sport most of us don’t know much about, but it sure seems authentic, the way they row really hard, and the harder they row, the faster they go, and if they’re all in sync with each other – this is the key, the teamwork thing – then look out, they can move really damn fast. So fast, these JV fellas with nothin’ to lose smoke the varsity guys, and start winning races, prompting Coach Ulbrickson to shock the university brass by sending the JV to the Olympic-qualifying event in Poughkeepsie instead of the varsity guys. Will they make it to Berlin, to row for gold in front of Hitler Himself? Of course they do, because we already know that’s going to happen. But will they win? Well, they’ll give it the ol’ college try.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Boys in the Boat isn’t too far removed from Clooney’s old-timey football movie Leatherheads, although that was a comic farce that didn’t really work instead of a serious drama that works in a fairly boring and traditional way, e.g., Seabiscuit and Miracle.

Performance Worth Watching: These characters are blander than Maude Flanders’ palate, so a talented guy like Edgerton – excellent in Master Gardener, Loving and many others – is left to gnaw on the meatless, marrowless bones of gruff-coach cliches. I appreciate the young-Richard-Gere charisma Turner gives off here, but it’s muted by a disappointingly shallow character arc.

Memorable Dialogue: “As good as you are, it’s not about you, Joe. Or me, or anybody else. It’s about the boat.” – Coach Ulbrickson delivers an oldie from the Big Book of Coachspeak

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Some will appreciate The Boys in the Boat for being unapologetically retro in its earnest, nostalgic tone and lush cinematography, but the rest of us will prop our eyelids open with toothpicks to get through it so we can nuke it with a pejorative: This is a nice movie. So nice. Nice to look at, nice performances, nice inspiring true story. It deserves no greater superlative. It’s a collection of lovely moving postcards with little investment in developing character and conflict beyond the painfully familiar. It’s nothing more than a hoary old underdogs vs. overdogs narrative, and the inner lives of these characters are as threadbare as Joe’s sweater. And then it amps up the triumphant music and pours on the syrupy emotion in an attempt to make us feel something, but the only thing we’re likely to feel is shamelessly manipulated.

Now, I’m not saying I wanted the film to be an instructional video about team rowing, but it pays so little attention to the ins and outs of the niche sport, it becomes representative of the film’s disinterest in the type of detail that enriches and authenticates a story beyond being a thin Wikipedia summation of who did the rowing and what the rowers accomplished – I learned more about tennis watching kissyface games in Challengers than I learned about rowing in The Boys in the Boat. What, exactly, do our protagonists do to gain an edge over their considerably more experienced and arrogant competitors? Do they work harder or train differently? Do they exercise any specific techniques or strategies? Who knows. They’re longshots, and they’re poor, and that inspires them to greatness, I guess. They have all the cliches on their side.

I have no doubt the real Joe Nantz and his coach and teammates were fine, complex human beings who certainly deserve to be more than mannequinesque characters in a film that indulges every sports-movie trope: Upbeat training montages, the breathless play-by-play announcer, friends and family back home crowded around radios, the ragtag group of nobodies going up against the titans of the sport, the coach’s rah-rah speech before the big race. It doesn’t even lean that hard into the slobs-vs.-snobs arc of the story, as our ragtag squad of newbs first competes against heavily moneyed Ivy League schools, and then a bunch of swastika’d Nazis. It’s as if Clooney realized this screenplay wasn’t going to transcend anyone’s sub-modest expectations for a period sports drama, so he made it as ordinary as possible.

Our Call: Snoozeville. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.