Concept: A young man from a steel mill family struggles to get into the University of Notre Dame and its football team.
Review Date: 2016

• I hate football movies. Maybe that’s because I hate football. Actually, I hate all sports movies except boxing movies, and it’s debatable how much of a sport boxing is. Boxing is more like a gladiator fight with rules. Anyway, I saw the Blu-Ray of this movie selling for 25 cents in a garage sale and said to myself, Hey, I gotta get it.
• I had heard a lot of good things about the film over the years, and the soundtrack is this incredibly sweet and poignant symphony by the late and great movie maestro Jerry Goldsmith. You listen to that music and say, Wow, the movie that accompanies this music can’t be all that bad, even if it’s a football movie.
• When I sat down to watch it with my wife (who is also no fan of football), the movie had everything going against it. A movie about a guy trying to get on a team sounds so predictable. I mean, what else can happen—that he fails to get in? Not much of a movie there. Besides that, the Blu-Ray cover gives away the ending. I watched it anyway.
• And I liked it. Liked it a lot, actually. To be able to captivate an audience despite their awareness how things will go and their hatred of the sport, it takes a great movie. And yes, this is a great movie. It dragged me in and had me crying and cheering along in spite of myself (gah, I don’t believe I wrote that).
• It doesn’t always follow the loser-to-winner formula, actually surprising me sometimes. Most of all, it’s a 100% convincing, not so much because of the football action (for which I could care less) but because of the stellar, moving performance by Sean Astin (Sam in the “Lord of the Rings” movies).
• The other star is the music, which takes this movie to a whole other level; it would not be the great movie it is without that soundtrack, which transforms the movie into something more than a football movie. Indeed, football is only the backdrop for the drama of a young man’s fight to overcome impossible obstacles. So technically, it’s not a football movie, OK? This is one of the extremely few movies that can live up to the word, “Inspiring.”