>>REVIEW
INVINCIBLE
STARRING Mark Wahlberg and Greg Kinnear
DIRECTED BY Ericson Core
There is a stigma attached to competitive sports that seems to warrant a certain level of disdain for films attempting to mine this melodramatic frontier. The fact that some can view sport as mere pornography and ignore the human component, that it is a product of one of our most fundamental desires (the struggle for recognition through success), is mildly annoying to me. What’s really annoying though is that a film, regardless of calibre, should be automatically judged negatively for using sport as a narrative device. Films like Bull Durham are viewed as great sports films, not great films, while small films like 1995’s Angus are utterly overlooked.
Which brings me to Invincible, a middle-of-the-road, inspirational sports drama that I found delectably easy to enjoy, but fear will be needlessly attacked for being just another generic sports film.
Brought to us by the producers of Remember the Titans and The Natural, Invincible dramatizes the real-life adventures of Philadelphia’s own Vince Papale (Mark Wahlberg). The year is 1976. Papale is a 30-year-old out of work substitute teacher/bartender who discovers his wife has abruptly left him with nothing but a vacant apartment. The only things Papale has in life are his beloved Philadelphia Eagles and a group of friends who struggle together against the bleak economic landscape of late ’70s Philadelphia. Each week they find salvation on a mud patch in south Philly where, encircled by car headlights, they trample their frustrations with a well-worn pigskin.
There is little inspiration in the lives of such men (even their beloved Eagles are a joke), that is until the new Eagles head coach Dick Vermeil (Greg Kinnear) makes the unprecedented announcement that he will hold an open tryout. A reluctant and self-doubting Papale (who only played one year of high school ball) is coerced into trying out for the team, giving a faint spark of light to an otherwise austere community. The rest, of course, is history.
Unlike Rocky or Rudy, this film’s focus is not one man’s triumph over adversity, but rather one beleaguered community’s ability to find strength from a small semblance of inspiration.
While the drama of sport may not be for everyone, for some it is everything. |
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