Film: When The Game Stands
Starring: Jim Caviezel, Michael Chiklis
Directed by: Thomas Carter

When The Game Stands Tall hopes to sell audiences on religion by leveraging the intensity of high school sports, but fumbles every good idea it has along the way.

I am not the type of person who spends their year waiting for the start of football season, but for as long as I can remember I have been a sucker for films about high school sports. I think everyone is, at least to an extent, but when audiences pay to see movies they expect to feature athletics and discover sermons disguised as motivational speeches instead, the fun of the game is lost. That’s the main problem with When The Game Stands Tall, and it’s apparent from the film’s opening moments that the story is incapable of embracing either sports or religion enough to create a thrilling piece of entertainment.

Based on a so-called ‘incredible’ true event, When The Game Stands Tall has been promoted as a story about the end of the longest winning streak in sports history, and the various battles the team at the center of it all went through in the months that followed. That does happen in the film, but the end of the streak does not occur until forty-five minutes into the near two-hour feature. The initial setup involves a town riding high on an unbelievable streak and a coach battling heart problems while trying to figure out God’s plan for his life. It’s interesting subject matter, but ultimately means very little once the streak is broken. It’s melodrama for the sake of melodrama, and it seems to serve no purpose other than stretching a thin story to feature length.

Once the streak is broken, which happens amidst an incredibly well-shot performance sequence, the film finally finds the pace and tone viewers had hoped to discover from the beginning. As with most sports films, the story is not about the game itself, but rather the lives of the people who put on pads and helmets in the name of gridiron glory. All the familiar high school sports film stereotypes are present: boy with overbearing father who pushes too hard, boy with ego problem, parents thinking more about college scouts than their child’s longterm happiness, unexpected deaths, and a coach who somehow always knows the right thing to say at the exact moment its needed. The only difference between what happens in this story and films you’ve seen before is that it’s wrapped around the idea of religion so fervently that even when God is not being discussed directly, the film finds a way to inject Christianity into the events taking place onscreen. For example, during a montage sequence featuring training footage, a crucifix is projected on top of other images.

There is nothing wrong with trying to combine religion and sports. In fact, the two have long paired well together on screen. The fault with When The Game Stands Tall is that it plays more like a commercial for religion than a story of faith and perseverance in uncertain times. The members of the De La Salle team are not as much characters as they are tools for the filmmakers to pick up and put down whenever that particular person’s story works to further the faith-based lifestyle the producers are trying to sell. This may work to manipulate simple minds and those predisposed to embrace religion, but it does not create an entertaining film, and ultimately it’s this pursuit of conversion that causes When The Game Stands Tall to fall apart.

GRADE: C-

Review written by James Shotwell Follow @utgjames

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James Shotwell

James Shotwell is the founder of Under The Gun Review. He loves writing about music and movies almost as much as he loves his two fat cats. He's also the co-founder of Antique Records and the Marketing Coordinator for Haulix. You should probably follow him on Twitter.

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