Callum Turner stars as Joe Rantz and Hadley Robinson as Joyce Sidmar in director George Clooney’s The Boys in the Boat.Laurie Sparham/MGM Studios
The Boys in the Boat
Directed by George Clooney
Written by Mark L. Smith, based on the book by Daniel James Brown
Starring Callum Turner, Hadley Robinson and Joel Edgerton
Classification PG; 124 minutes
Opens in theatres Dec. 25
George Clooney must be stopped. Not from acting. In fact, the Nespresso-powered superstar should be encouraged to step in front of the camera more often, given that his only performance this year was a quick cameo at the end of The Flash (thereby saving at least five seconds of an otherwise dreadful 144 minutes).
No, it’s George Clooney the director who must be gently sat down, or perhaps physically restrained, and given a stern talking-to. Nine films into his directorial career now, and it is clear that the guy only operates on two behind-the-scenes wavelengths: he’ll either frustrate or bore you to death. Either way, to watch “A George Clooney Film” is to accept a good, long nap.
So, yes, there’s not much to recommend about The Boys in the Boat, the kind of historical sports story that Clooney has already made (2008′s Leatherheads) but with a far less charismatic cast, and this time with the placid-turns-flaccid sheen of a CBS Sunday movie.
Based on Daniel J. Brown’s non-fiction book of the same name, the film follows the travails of the University of Washington’s men’s rowing crew that went on to compete at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Composed mostly of working-class students, some of whom joined the team simply so they’d have a place to sleep and three square meals, the crew – including Joe Rantz (Callum Turner), who was abandoned by his parents as a teenager – must face off against better funded competitors during the tail end of the Depression. Then there are the intense physical demands of the sport, not to mention the spectre of heading to a Germany led by Adolf Hitler.
Sounds like the makings of a decent underdog story, no? Perhaps it might have been, if the story was handled by more exciting creative hands. But as shepherded by Clooney and screenwriter Mark L. Smith (who also wrote Clooney’s dreadful 2020 sci-fi drama The Midnight Sky), The Boys in the Boat is as dry as its title characters get wet.
Largely exercising the most interesting material of Brown’s book – Hitler’s attempts to impress the world with the scope of his Games while hiding his regime’s brutal treatment of Jewish people and other persecuted minorities – to focus on a bunch of blandly sketched pretty boys, Clooney and Smith deliver a movie so by-the-numbers that it rivals sheep-counting as the perfect substitute for Ambien. The aesthetic can be summed up as “light brown,” the characters rarely stretch beyond “Boy 1″ and “Girl 2,” and the rowing scenes lack a sense of propulsive tension (Clooney clearly hasn’t seen David Fincher’s The Social Network).
As the lead hero, Rantz is little more than a collection of Depression-era clichés, which fail to resonate on even the most basic level. Weirdly, Clooney also refuses to muss up the impossibly pretty Turner, who looks about as familiar with a life of soup kitchens and shack-living as, well, George Clooney. While Joel Edgerton adds a tiny dose of edge as the boys’ coach Al Ulbrickson, his efforts are all for naught, too.
The Boys in the Boat is a film made with such a gently dull spirit that you cannot help but wonder if Clooney put himself to sleep during production. Someone get this man a Nespresso.