A Season on the Brink

This film clearly is not the greatest one in the history of the world, but it does have one real thing going for it. Brian Dennehy's performance as the General (AKA Bob Knight) is probably the greatest portrayal we will ever see of the character. True, he does not look or sound exactly like Bob Knight, but who else does? Dennehy had a very challenging role in this picture, and while the representation is not exact (he said himself that one can't act exactly like Bob Knight without getting a headache), I can't imagine anyone doing better.

I think that Bob Knight is a character who is best explored in documentary form, and that approach would have worked just fine as a film. As it is, however, we're left with a TV movie that is just slightly above average.

6/10

Absorbing and highly interesting portrait of how Bobby Knight (Brian Dennehy) handled the numerous on-going dilemmas while coaching the Indiana Hoosiers during the tumultous 1985-86 season. I don't know anyone else who could handle playing "The General" besides Dennehy. Playing Bob Knight isn't exactly like playing a character from a William Shakespeare story. The atmosphere that is displayed here during any of the games, practices, or off the court isn't only real, but very bleak and unforgiving. The movie is based on a novel (of the same title) written by John Feinstein. I give the people at ESPN who decided to back the movie a lot of credit. A captivating and emotional tour-de-force.

This movie probably seemed like a great idea in pre-production. "Let's make a movie about one of the greatest and most controversial athletic coaches of the modern era! And let's cast Brian Dennehey as Coach Bobby Knight!" That's where this movie went terribly wrong. Why cast an actor who bears no semblance of the man he's portraying? And then, why let this actor turn his character into not Coach Knight, but Brian Dennehey in a red sweater? As I sat watching this movie on ESPN, I didn't find myself believing this man was actually Coach Knight. He didn't look like him, talk like him, act like him, or even walk like him. I could not get past this fact, and thusly, I could not enjoy the movie. When Paul Newman and Robert Redford were cast as the outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, we didn't care if they were accurate historical models of their true characters because most of us had never even heard of these men until we saw the movie. But, with someone as visible in today's media as Coach Knight, you have to do better. When Anthony Hopkins was cast as Nixon, it was the same situation. But, Anthony Hopkins made us believe he in fact was Nixon. Dennehey didn't even try. What might have been a great movie was turned sour by this. Besides the fact that this movie tried to do for the four-letter word what "Saving Private Ryan" did for dismemberment, it stunk. Too little of the real Coach Knight and too much profanity for the sake of shock value turned this movie into a "season to turn off half-way through the broadcast." The only good thing about this is that it was television movie. I didn't have to waste my hard-earned money on this piece of trash.

A Season on the Brink, the first movie made by ESPN ain't gonna win any awards, but its an entertaining looks at the most wildly charismatic and controversial coach in NCAA basketball history, Bobby Knight.

You can tell when you watch the movie that it didn't quite have the budget of your normal movie - the basketball scenes are kinda cheesy lookin and when they try to weave it in with actual game footage it looks a little ridiculous.

But the movie is worth watching just for Brian Dennehy, who looks and talks exactly like Bobby Knight. The movie surely takes some dramatic license, it has to, and the cast arouns Dennehy is nothing to write home about - but Dennehy sparkles and the movie is certainly worth watching for any college basketball or any sports fan.

As you can tell from my chosen screen name (a nickname I got on the job), I had a great interest in this film and it paid off. After all the pre-film publicity and trailers, I expected a scene in which disgruntled players and whiny referees chased Coach Knight with torches to the old windmill.

Instead, and having read the book I know this, the film stayed very close to the book and made a real attempt to show both Knight in his rages and tantrums and as a mentor, friend and a loving father. This film gives no quarter to either the pro-Knight or anti-Knight fans. The casting was excellent and the film's action scenes looked like these guys at least hit the local high school gym a few hours per week to get ready.

If I have any complaint with this film, it's that they seemed to try to use basketball footage to connect random episodes from the book. There would be a very moving, intense scene, then a graphic saying something like "Indiana won seven of the next eight games". This is like making a movie about World War II beginning with Hitler's election in Germany, then showing a graphic saying "Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and then conquored France", then cutting to a scene of The Battle of the Bulge.

But other than that, this was a great film, one of the few truly great sports films.