It’s a big ask to expect an audience to root for plucky little America, but George Clooney has had a bloody good go at it. This stodgy underdog sporting drama goes for a nostalgic blue-collar patriotism as a lowly West Coast university rowing team battle with their more prestigious Ivy League counterparts to reach the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It’s solidly done, and rowing as a sport is inherently cinematic, but some exhilarating races aside it is a deeply ordinary story.

America is in the grip of the Great Depression and young college student Joe Rantz (an unassuming, likeable Callum Turner) is living in a shanty town and struggling to pay his college fees at Washington University. He signs up for the rowing team tryouts, despite having no experience, as it comes with a small wage and a guaranteed room. Making the team, he and his teammates, under the taciturn direction of coach Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton, furrowed of brow, sparing with smiles), are talented enough to compete against the best in the US, and then the World.

The Boys in the Boat is a remarkable true story told in the most stale, ordinary manner possible. Beyond Joe and Al, there is little characterisation to most of the other teammates, and even less to their pretty, endlessly supportive partners (played by Hadley Robinson and Courtney Henggeler). It’s fair enough that the narrative focusses on the Boys and the Boat, but Joe’s courtship with Joyce is so perfunctory it may as well not be there. There are obstacles to overcome, lessons to learn through homespun philosophy, robustly heterosexual bonds between strapping men to maintain, and some dastardly Germans to hand the biggest water-based kicking since the last U-boat was scuttled.

Every beat of the story is hit as metronomically as each stroke from the Washington team striking the water. Not only is there little in the way of genuine narrative excitement, but even an absurd number of confected obstacles faced by the team do little to raise the pulse. Perhaps Clooney and screenwriter Mark L. Smith felt the need to beef up the incident quota outside the boat, an instinct you can understand once you’ve witnessed the fourth training montage in the space of 40 minutes. But the racing scenes are by many lengths the main reason to watch this. You get a real sense of the excitement and the level of endurance required. You can tell how good these young men are as athletes, so the underdog story comes with a large injection of class consciousness, rather than a dearth of talent. On arrival in Berlin, it’s more ‘Coracles of Fire’ than ‘Cool Rowings’.

But as a whole it’s all so clunky, not least in a cloying score from Alexandre Desplat and an unnecessary, saccharine framing device featuring an elderly Joe offering beneficent advice to a young family member with his first pair of oars. You yearn for one iota of the vibrancy of the rowing scenes, even those featuring a curiously insistent cameo from Hitler himself, and Jesse Owens popping up with a quick aside about race relations. Even Clooney’s decision to film the final race with a series of extreme close ups of tortured faces, muscles screaming with exertion, and bellowing coxes in a way reminiscent of Leni Riefenstahl‘s document of the same Olympics, is a stroke of weirdness that the rest of the film sorely lacks. Unlike the team itself, The Boys in the Boat is just dependable and competent, and that’s far more of an indictment than it should be.

In cinemas nationwide from Fri 12 Jan 2024