openswitch

Overall this was a good movie. I wouldn’t mind owning it, but I’m not paying full price. Maybe if I found it on sale somewhere I’d pick it up, or perhaps pick up a used copy. I really enjoyed Matthew McConaughey’s performance. Every time I see him in another movie I like him more. But the film as a whole was less good than I thought it would be. It all felt a little like Remember The Giants.

Of course, everyone loves a feel-good football movie, so it’s not like the film was bad or anything, it just wasn’t spectacular. I cried a little toward the end but nothing like when I watched Brokeback Mountain.

The thing that really turned me off though, was the fact that some characters were severely underdeveloped; such as the character of Annie Cantrell. At the beginning of the movie she’s engaged to one of Marshall’s football players. We meet her fiance once and then he dies in the plane ride. After that her character remains a fixture in the film while she struggles with letting her fiance go. It felt like she was a main character in the movie, but at the same time she was severely underdeveloped.

I felt the same way about most of the characters. While the story was touching, all the characters felt totally shallow. I would rather have seen a few characters developed well but instead we got all the characters only partially developed. That’s why I only gave the movie a 3.5/5 rating.