I watched this because it had one of Rutger Hauer's last performances (the film is dedicated to Rutger, having been released posthumously). I expected his performance to be a small component, as it is in many of his later films where he does not play a main character - but his limited screen time is well used here, and he brings gravitas to the important scenes he is in.
The rest of the performances are pretty good, too. With low budget films you never know if they cast actors or just people they happened to have around - luckily it was the former, in this case.
Also, the production values are quite good, the soundtrack, the editing - everything is very well done, especially for a director's first film. It is well paced and the characters have just enough background for us to care about them as much as needed to make the story engaging. There isn't a lot of distracting "creative" film work here, the scenes are set to tell the story, and they do a pretty good job.
So there's a lot of good stuff here, despite this underdog redemption tale not being anything too tremendously new. It has a lot of the tropes of the films that have preceded it, but they are transported into the world of the pool hall.
There have been some very negative review of this film that have left me puzzled. I find the rating in IMDB is far too low for a film of good (if not great) quality. The only ones with comments seem to hone in on the "inaccuracies" of the sport. These complaints may highlight legitimate mistakes either in the performances or the editing, but they did not distract me in the least. Only someone so absorbed in the sport would notice, let alone care. I find it a little absurd, as this is a good character drama with some heart.
