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'American Underdog' Review: Faith-Based Football Biopic That Fails to Convert
The Christian duo behind "I Still Believe" return with the incredible true story of a large and handsome man who was good at football
The incredible true story of a large and handsome man who was good at football and — thanks to his enduring faith in Jesus Christ — never gave up on his dream of playing it for enormous sums of money, Andrew and Jon Erwin’s “American Underdog” doesn’t quite sell the “against the odds” angle promised by its title. Which isn’t to say that Kurt Warner’s mythic rise from Cedar Falls supermarket clerk to the oldest Super Bowl-winning quarterback in NFL history was unworthy of being adapted into a mawkishly competent sports biopic, only that it’s kind of miraculous when anyone manages to become a famous athlete (as this movie’s opening narration spells out for us in statistical detail), and the Erwin brothers fail to contort Warner’s story into especially compelling evidence of all things possible...
Like so many of the faith-based biopics that have helped turn the genre into a flyover-state phenomenon, “American Underdog” is sustained by a vaguely fetishistic enthusiasm for its subject’s hardships (in this case: poverty, tornadoes, and a wife whose devotion to Jesus Christ is only surpassed by her devotion to bad wigs). For every 10 seconds of football action, we get 10 minutes of Levi staring into the camera like a deer in the headlights and wondering “why God would give me a dream that’s never gonna come true.” What kind of cruel deity would bless someone with the upper body of a small mountain range, only to curse them with the responsibilities of a human adult? Make it make sense!
Of course, the Erwin brothers — wildly dynamic filmmakers whose recent Walmart products range from faith-based music biopics like “I Still Believe” to faith-based football biopics like “Woodlawn” and this one — have become the leading auteurs of megachurch cinema because their movies could be confused for secular fare if you squint. Telling stories that emphasize general hardships over religious persecution and keep the God talk at a low whisper until the third act, the Erwins tend to eschew the Newsmax crowd in favor of Trojan horsing their way onto the godless screens of America’s multiplexes, and “American Underdog” is the duo’s most agnostic bid for mainstream success thus far...
Is “American Underdog” a good movie? Not even a little bit, but that’s kind of like saying “The Power of the Dog” is a bad microwave toaster. Traditional metrics of quality hardly seem relevant when it comes to a biopic that’s less interested in satisfying any narrative conflict than it is in paying off its protagonist’s spiritual investment...
https://www.indiewire.com/2021/12/american-underdog-review-1234686634/
The incredible true story of a large and handsome man who was good at football and — thanks to his enduring faith in Jesus Christ — never gave up on his dream of playing it for enormous sums of money, Andrew and Jon Erwin’s “American Underdog” doesn’t quite sell the “against the odds” angle promised by its title. Which isn’t to say that Kurt Warner’s mythic rise from Cedar Falls supermarket clerk to the oldest Super Bowl-winning quarterback in NFL history was unworthy of being adapted into a mawkishly competent sports biopic, only that it’s kind of miraculous when anyone manages to become a famous athlete (as this movie’s opening narration spells out for us in statistical detail), and the Erwin brothers fail to contort Warner’s story into especially compelling evidence of all things possible...
Like so many of the faith-based biopics that have helped turn the genre into a flyover-state phenomenon, “American Underdog” is sustained by a vaguely fetishistic enthusiasm for its subject’s hardships (in this case: poverty, tornadoes, and a wife whose devotion to Jesus Christ is only surpassed by her devotion to bad wigs). For every 10 seconds of football action, we get 10 minutes of Levi staring into the camera like a deer in the headlights and wondering “why God would give me a dream that’s never gonna come true.” What kind of cruel deity would bless someone with the upper body of a small mountain range, only to curse them with the responsibilities of a human adult? Make it make sense!
Of course, the Erwin brothers — wildly dynamic filmmakers whose recent Walmart products range from faith-based music biopics like “I Still Believe” to faith-based football biopics like “Woodlawn” and this one — have become the leading auteurs of megachurch cinema because their movies could be confused for secular fare if you squint. Telling stories that emphasize general hardships over religious persecution and keep the God talk at a low whisper until the third act, the Erwins tend to eschew the Newsmax crowd in favor of Trojan horsing their way onto the godless screens of America’s multiplexes, and “American Underdog” is the duo’s most agnostic bid for mainstream success thus far...
Is “American Underdog” a good movie? Not even a little bit, but that’s kind of like saying “The Power of the Dog” is a bad microwave toaster. Traditional metrics of quality hardly seem relevant when it comes to a biopic that’s less interested in satisfying any narrative conflict than it is in paying off its protagonist’s spiritual investment...
https://www.indiewire.com/2021/12/american-underdog-review-1234686634/
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