Delayed Reaction: The Winning Season

The Pitch: Sam Rockwell would've made a good Morris Buttermaker too.

An alcoholic deadbeat coaches a high school girls basketball team.

There are many, many movies that The Winning Season borrows from. The sports genre is filled with movies about ill-equipped coaches of rag-tag groups of misfits. The Mighty Ducks, Slap Shot, Major League, Hoosiers, Ladybugs, Little Giants, Rebound. It's actually hard for me to think of one that isn't about that. The most obvious comparison, of course, is Bad News Bears. I wouldn't say The Winning Season is even as good as the 2005 remake (which I still liked a good deal). It's still enjoyable though. I mainly saw it because the cast is pretty great. I don't think Sam Rockwell has ever been bad in anything. It has a pre-Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, pre-Social Network Rooney Mara. It's from the early days of Hollywood trying to figure out if Emma Roberts is a star. It features Emily Rios before she started making the rounds on a lot of great shows (FNL, Breaking Bad, The Bridge). And, Margo Martindale has been around for decades, but this is right before Justified made her an Emmy winner and she became a character actor cult hero.

The movie isn't anything special. It is entertaining though and subverted my expectations enough to keep it interesting. I would've bet money as soon as I heard that Rockwell's Bill had a daughter that she'd end up on his team by the end. I would've also predicted the girl with the broken leg would be called in to shoot some free throws in a key moment, a la Hoosiers. That didn't happen, and they really did try to take Rockwell's alcoholism seriously and addressed some issues like racism and homophobia that they could just as easily avoided. So, good on them.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend