Every sports film needs to have a big game on the horizon. Director Ric Roman Waugh’s National Champions follows suit, as it kicks off three days before the N.C.A.A. national title football game in New Orleans, where the fictional Missouri Wolves aim to finish their season undefeated. But instead of mentally and physically preparing for their moment in the spotlight, star quarterback LeMarcus James (Stephan James) and his teammate Emmett Sunday (Alexander Ludwig) are about to kick off a player’s strike protesting the exploitation of unpaid athletes in an enormously profitable college sports landscape.
National Champions, then, is a film about the business of sports, largely trading on-the-field thrills for the tension of closed-door meetings and information leaks to the media, and mostly playing out in the drab rooms and conference halls of a hotel surrounding New Orleans’s Superdome. As LeMarcus and Emmett attempt to drum up support among their fellow athletes and make their cause go viral, the film suggests a football-themed spin on Steven Soderbergh’s High Flying Bird. But if that film crackled with insider-knowledge realism, the ideas in Adam Mervis’s blunt screenplay have the analytical finesse of, well, a football to the face.
An early scene in National Champions sees LeMarcus and Emmett psyching themselves up for the media firestorm they’re about to ignite by jokingly reciting Samuel L. Jackson’s famous Ezekiel 25:17 speech from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction to each other. The moment may be intended as a cheeky throwaway reference, but it’s part and parcel of a film that feels like it’s been strung together from a series of overly familiar awards-clip-ready speeches.
The film’s actors, from J.K. Simmons as gruff Coach James Lazor to Uzo Aduba as savvy public relations rep Katherine Poe, do a fine, even heroic job at spouting the script’s often maudlin and melodramatic dialogue. But by the time Timothy Olyphant, as philosophical college professor Elliott Schmidt, arrives to tell our conflicted protagonists, “It’s not about the right or wrong decision. It’s about the one you’re willing to live with,” no amount of committed acting can prevent the film’s commentary from being subsumed by the dialogue’s phoniness.
National Champions suggests a ticking-bomb thriller, complete with intermittent time-stamp countdowns to the game’s kickoff. It even demonstrates the same level of no-nonsense gravitas of many of Waugh’s action movies. It’s all supposed to keep us excitedly wondering whether LeMarcus will eventually agree to suit up for the big game or not. But as everyone on screen comes across as a hollow mouthpiece for one issue or another, that proposition ultimately doesn’t matter, which is doubly disappointing considering that the complex facets to LeMarcus’s strike agenda practically beg for more piercing exploration. In comparison to Oliver Stone’s thrillingly bombastic Any Given Sunday and its look at the relationship between sports, media and capitalism, National Champions feels like a beginner’s playbook.
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