Richard Crouse

There are underdog sports movies, and then there is “The Boys in the Boat,” the new film from director George Clooney, now playing in theatres. Set during the Great Depression, the characters in this film fight expectations and fascism.

Based upon Daniel James Brown’s book of the same name, “The Boys in the Boat” centers on Joe Rantz (Callum Turner), a struggling University of Washington student who, unable to pay the balance of his tuition for the semester, signs up for the school’s rowing team because it comes with a part-time job and a place to live.

“The depression hit everyone hard,” he says. “No jobs. No food. We were broke.”

Under the tutelage of coach Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton) and boatbuilder George Pocock (Peter Guinness), Rantz and the Washington Huskies, his team of inexperienced, working-class student rowers, are pitted against the richest schools in the country.

“We rowed out of need,” Rantz says. “The need to stay in school. The need to eat. To sleep.”

Through need and determination, the Huskies earned a run at the gold at the 1936’s Nazi-overseen Berlin Olympics.

“They said we couldn’t compete with the richest schools in the nation,” Rantz says. “They said we couldn’t beat the Germans. But they didn’t understand who we were.”

An old-fashioned story of grit and perseverance, “The Boys on the Boat” is a mix of stoicism and sports. Of course, the sport is simply the vessel by which the characters glide through the story. The movie spends a fair amount of time on the water, but rowing is secondary to the rush of inspiration that fuels the story. It’s a story of team work, of young men coming together to overcome not only the economic hardships of their lives and illness on the eve of their big row, but also the Nazis.

Unfortunately, the movie also attempts to play tug-a-rope with your heartstrings. It works its way through to the inevitable happy ending with crowd-pleasing beats that will seem very familiar to anyone with a knowledge of 1990s era sports flicks.

Still, it is a handsomely mounted movie with several intense competition scenes that will set your pulse racing, even if the overly sentimental presentation doesn’t.