A Season on the Brink

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.

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

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.

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.

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.