by Thomas Willett
11:00pm PST, October 26, 2011
Nowadays, inspirational true stories and sports have become synonymous. While few, like Warrior, break this concept, it’s almost guaranteed that if it involves a basketball, there will be a happy ending and a written epilogue. It handicaps the genre, making every trope more obvious and the ending more-so. How do you make a sports story fresh without smudging the historical context? As The Fighter has proven, it’s in the performances and the ability to make the characters human.
The Mighty Macs is the story of Cathy Rush (Carla Gugino), who in 1971 took a job at Immaculata College as the head coach of the girl’s basketball team. Rush has to start from scratch, turning the dusty storage room back into a basketball court and a team of inexperienced girls into the national champions. While many of the nuns disagree with the way she operates, Sister Sunday (Marley Shelton) joins her as assistant coach to create school pride through flyers and buttons.
This movie meets all of the standard cues, including dramatic scores over basketball games, overcoming adversity, and standard performances to imply the team as a unit. Very little of the actual plot feels fresh and the build up leads to a convenient end. While it keeps a steady pace, it’s filled with tension-lacking moments that keep this from becoming an ambitious take on women’s sports movies. It plays all of the emotional and inspirational beats, but does little to give itself an identity.
Despite the formulaic plot, the lead performance by Carla Gugino manages to bring life into the story. Her presence alone draws confidence. Even when she’s playing a snarky coach to motivate the team, there’s a sense of dedication. Every scene features a moment where she finds hope and pushes the story forward. While it isn’t enough to rescue the entire movie, she gives enough energy to make it tolerable and the underlying message of female empowerment stronger.
The rest of the cast has some good moments, but they’re eventually reduced to playing stock roles to help the story advance safely. Numerous team members get brief voice over by Gugino to explain their background, but little contributing to their personality. Marley Shelton has a few moments with Gugino that provide entertaining banter, but she’s the only secondary character to be fleshed out. She becomes a crucial part to the story as she also manages to overcome some personal problems that helps to show the power of basketball.
A subplot involving a rocky marriage because of talent envy disappears in favor of Cathy’s belligerent husband Ed (played by David Boreanaz) coming around in the end. While it’s not a crucial story element, it helps to show the disabilities of this movie’s script. It gives the basics, and the actors do their best to perform convincingly. By the end, there’s a feeling that the impact could’ve been greater had these subplots been more explored.
Of course, this could largely be due to first time director and writer Tim Chambers’s goal of making a rated G family movie. The rating handicaps the feature from exploring certain territories and limits the characters in general. The movie’s inoffensive nature makes it easier to enjoy, yet the conflicts don’t feel that threatening. In addition to being a true story, it eliminates most of the momentum and suspense it needed to be great.
Overall, The Mighty Macs is just another true inspirational sports movie that does each move by the book. While it features good performances and a consistent pace, it’s not enough to compete with the plot’s many tropes. It lacks any original conflict, yet the cast does well to bring some life to the story. In the end, it’s not a memorable film, nor is it a bad film. It’s just a movie that creates a sense of hope for its protagonist. It exists for the sake of existence, which is problematic when the true story had so much potential.
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