Le match de leur vie

"The Game Of Their Lives" lives up to expectations as a exciting underdog sports movie. I loved it. Saw it in a theater with only 3 other people - at noon, on a Monday, raining - but it didn't matter because I was engaged and wrapped up in the 1950's story of a bunch of ordinary guys who did something extraordinary.

Based on a real event with real, still living, people it is about heros of WWII who came home and went about their lives until asked to form a team for the World Cup soccer matches. They have only weeks and decide to get some players from the east coast and some from one area of St. Louis, MO. from the Italian enclave known as The Hill.

Frank Borghi (Gerard Butler) is the goalie and a leader of the group. The challenge is to get the whole group to pull together and mesh the different styles to make a team that may make a good showing. They don't expect to win as most of the teams they will play are more or less professionals and/or have played together for years.

The soccer playing is exciting even for this old gal who knows little about the game. The cinematography is very good and keeps the pace of the game and shots of the crowds and sports announcers ticking along and by the end when time runs out on the English players, and the Americans have won this great upset, I was ready to cheer too.

I disagree with most of the reviews I have read. This is a good sports movie and the performances and pacing are as good as "Rudy" or any other underdog film.

One thing I loved was the look of the people and homes and cars. It was the 1950's again and the music I danced to was just right. One for my movie collection. 9/10

I very much enjoyed this movie. The return in time to 1950 was well done & very realistic. The movie did a nice job of recreating one of the most forgotten episodes in USA sports history. There is one thing I would have liked to have seen and that would have been an 'epilogue' at the end of the film stating what these players did with the rest of their lives. This is what was done at the end of movies such as 'Chariots of Fire' and 'American Graffiti'. I do know that Walter Bahr ended up as the soccer coach at Penn State. I know that Harry Keough was the soccer coach at St. Louis U. when they won five NCAA titles. It would have been nice to see these kind of summaries about all of the featured players.

The story of the 1950 United States World Cup soccer team's stunning upset victory over England is one which has been begging to be told for years. One of the great sports underdog stories of all time and hardly anyone knows a thing about it. Many younger American soccer fans don't even know it happened. Finally, this movie has come along to shed some well-deserved light on those players who toiled mostly in anonymity and whose achievements seemed lost in the dustbin of history. It is wonderful that this movie was made. You just wish the movie had been made better. The Game of Their Lives or The Miracle Match or whatever they're calling it these days never quite hits the heights. It tells a story which needed to be told. It just doesn't tell it in an entertaining enough way.

This movie is cut from the tried and true sports underdog movie mold (Hoosiers, Rocky, Rudy and so on) but it never has the same sense of energy which drove those films forward. While those films had a certain zest to them as they built towards a thrilling conclusion this film just kind of slogs along. It's not nearly as engrossing as it could have, and given the great story they had to work with, probably should have been. The fact that certain details of history have been twisted and changed to try to make things seem more dramatic than they actually were doesn't help either. A misguided attempt to create a "villain" on the English team also falls flat. It seems the filmmakers were afraid to allow this story to speak for itself and were determined to spice it up with some artificial drama. The fake drama doesn't work and we're not left with enough real drama either.

This is not to say that The Game of Their Lives (or The Miracle Match or whatever) is a bad movie. It's OK. You just get the sense that this story deserved a movie which is better than just OK. The acting is fine with Gerard Butler and Wes Bentley the key figures in a cast which otherwise is made up of mostly unknowns with the exception of, oh sweet irony, Englishman Patrick Stewart as the American soccer reporter who serves as the film's narrator while relishing the memory of the English defeat. The visuals are very good and the soccer scenes quite well done. But what's lacking is drama. The film never really grabs you, from the "getting to know you" phase as we meet the players all the way through the "thrilling" climax which comes off as rather ordinary. And what the U.S. team achieved in Brazil in 1950 was anything but ordinary. Unfortunately the full impact of what those men accomplished and who those men really were doesn't come across in this film. And that's a shame.

If you enjoy soccer, you'll really like this movie about USA underdogs playing the Brits, the best in the world in 1950. The audience I was with consisted of adults and kids in soccer uniforms. The movie drew cheers and applause especially during the final confrontation. Gerard Butler as the great goalkeeper Frank Borghi really gives this movie heart and soul. The actors were chosen for their ability to actually play soccer so the game sequences are very realistic. Butler especially throws his body into a bone-crunching depiction of a goalkeeper with the heart of a lion.

You don't have to be know much about soccer to enjoy this movie. I highly recommend it to everyone who likes an exciting movie and wonderful acting. Three cheers!

This was a good movie, regardless of whether it was about soccer or not. The movie had good actors, and some surprise actors (Gavin Rossdale, John Harkes, etc.) and was a good "person" movie. It did do a good job of telling about the 1950 upset victory for the Americans, and it was good that it stopped right there and didn't include the following matches in that World Cup for the Amerians of losing to Spain 1-3 and Chile 2-6. So it ended on a good note. I actually had a comment about one of the user comments....the one gloating about his daughter's soccer team and how good they are because they are Arizona state champions. I have lived in Ohio most of my life and lately I have lived in Arizona....I am sorry to break it to him, but Arizona soccer is terrible. Teams in Arizona would get crushed by teams in Ohio. A state champion of Arizona is a mediocre Ohio team. Or MIssouri, or Michigan, or California, or Florida.