Also: It was written by Michael Clayton’s Tony Gilroy, his first produced script. Silly, but unquestionably cheerful and ultimately winning.
That the movie strains credulity - there is literally no one else other than this hockey player who knows how to skate? - but the two leads have enough chemistry to make it work. Sweeney) gets a head injury and can’t play hockey anymore, and is thus coupled with a spoiled figure skater (Moira Kelly) in the Olympic pairs competition. This by-the-numbers sports romantic comedy has a semi-clever premise that represents what’s likely the only way you could make a romantic comedy on ice: Former hockey player (D.B. If audiences didn’t want to watch one movie about Steve Prefontaine, they certainly didn’t want to watch two. Unfortunately, Leto’s movie came out first, and once it flopped, there was nowhere for this movie to go. It also features a fantastic performance from Donald Sutherland as Bill Bowerman, the loyal trainer and coach, as hackneyed a sports-movie staple as the Big Game itself. This one - the better one, written and directed by Robert Towne - features Billy Crudup as Prefontaine and deftly leaps over most of the sports-movie clichés that the Leto film is unable to hurdle. If you’re keeping score, this was the movie about long-distance runner Steve Prefontaine that didn’t have Jared Leto. Fun fact: This is one of several movies unable to secure the rights to the Olympic name itself the goal here is “the World Wintersport Games.”
It still seems a little too “look at the heterosexual men ice dancing” than you’d like, and it’s not quite as anarchic as an Anchorman or Step Brothers. The movie has its moments, and this was when Ferrell was more into the surrealistic aspect of his comedy than the family-friendly version you see today. This Will Ferrell comedy actually wrings most of its laughs out of the rival figure-skating combo to Ferrell and Jon Heder, the then-real-life couple of Will Arnett and Amy Poehler. Because if there’s anything more likely to unite a divided nation than the Winter Games, it’s angry commenters taking issue with an online ranking of films. So in between enjoying curling, the luge, the biathlon, and hockey, take a gander at our rundown. And we ultimately decided not to rank this list based on how Olympics-heavy each film was: Munich got as much consideration as One Day in September. For one thing, we combined narrative films with nonfiction, including three documentaries that are among the highlights of Criterion’s crazily comprehensive 100 Years of Olympics Films box set, which came out at the end of last year. And in the spirit of figure-skating judges, we’re warning you ahead of time that this listing will be highly subjective.
With the 2018 Winter Olympics in full swing, we decided to rank the 15 best Olympics movies ever made. So it’s no wonder that the movies about the Games are equally epic. Even in our fractured, distracted modern times, the Olympics remain something that brings everybody together. For another, unlike our so-called World Series, they actually bring together the entire planet in a global competition to determine who’s really the best in every sport. For one thing, they only take place once every four years. Sure, they’re both basically the same thing - a celebration of pageantry, a feast of human drama - but when you’re talking about the Olympics, the stakes are always elevated.
As the Olympics are to ordinary sporting events, so too is the Olympics sports movie to the run-of-the-mill sports drama.