A Season on the Brink

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.

Being an avid ESPN watcher, I can't even guess how many previews the network had for "A Season on the Brink"...To be honest I think the producers should have spent more time on the actual program then on all the hype. OK, this movie really seemed to have no middle ground: In the majority of scenes with his current players Bob Knight is just a bully. His language is just atrocious, and plainly it offended me to hear the F-bomb 50+ times in this movie, the show made its point that BK has a "potty-mouth," but enough was enough. Secondly, the other half of the movie tried to pain BK like a total angel. The scenes with his lovable son seemed contrived and way to lovey-dovey. When the older player(guy in wheel-chair) comes back to watch a practice he thanks Bob for saving his life, buying him a home, giving him a foundation....blah blah blah The movie just ended 10 mins ago, so maybe I'm jumping to a quick conclusion...but I think ESPN should stick to what it knows with sports broadcasting and forget its new original films projects

ESPN attempts to give us a look at the inside wheeling and dealings of the charismatic coach Bobby Knight(Brian Dennehy)whipping an Indiana Hoosier team into shape to compete in the 1985-86 basketball season. Knight is the vocal point of the project and there are some good scenes where real game footage is used. Interest is moderate and it is odd watching a candy coated, but nonetheless brash vision of the ballsy coach. Dennehy seems at ease with the role and some good performances are turned in by Al Thompson, James Lafferty, Michael James Johnson and Yorick Park as Indiana team members. Not as impressive as a three pointer, but worth a trip to the free throw line.

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.

This film was a highly anticipated one for me, partly due to all of the hype created by ESPN and because it was based on the real life character Bobby Knight. The movie had it's own style to it, with clips of actual Hoosier footage inserted into the acting, which in a way resembled the style of Forrest Gump. This film, in my opinion, is a "watch-one-time" movie because most of the good parts were given away by the commercials and it basically displayed what most of us sports buffs knew about Bob Knight anyways.

Plus: Profane language added realism and brought a new perspective to the reality of the Knight regime

Minus: It was a fairly uninteresting film, unless you are a devout

Hoosier fan



In sum, good work ESPN, don't quit your day job, but try to make a couple more good films.