Review of Hoosiers (1986) by Patrick G — 24 Aug 2008

I enjoyed the pastoral photage of a rural Indiana that I have seen once before when I spent a day in Elkhart and even made it to South Bend when I visited Notre Dame.

Gene Hackman is a very good one dimensional sort of character actor and he did his best to give life to this movie about a man who comes from nowhere,with a jaded coaching past, to into a very small, obscure Indianan town to coach their basketball team into a surprising contender.

I didn't think the overall drama was too believeable. All the characters seemed a bit one-dimensional in their roles in the movie. The town ignorami were going to be fundamentalist christian bigots and the movie director did his best to emphasize that they were supposed to be the bad guys.

I never like it when movies make the bad guys completely bad. I truly believe that most people have good in them and when a movie director and screewriter go overboard to make a certain person of creed out to be a bad influence, I cannot take the overall story line seriously.

The ending is way too predictable and the dramatic build up not as seductive as say "Rocky" as seen in other sports movies, but again, the story was interesting enough to get me to the end of it. That's about it.

There wasn't any noteworthy acting other than Dennis Hopper playing a classic drunk. Hopper is one of my favorite actors and he did his job nicely in this movie.