Why another rite-of-passage football movie? We’ve seen this story told a million times. Well, there are a million pizza joints in New York City—why open another one? If it’s a good one, people are simply going to go.
There are also only eight archetypal stories. Every story under the sun is a variation of one of these eight, and they are told over and over.
The story of “Undefeated” is a Cinderella story—unrecognized virtue at last recognized. This version is uncommonly well told.
Bill Courtney, a former high school football coach turned successful entrepreneur, buys a lumberyard in North Memphis, Tenn. Local Manassas High School has a beyond-dismal 110-year football record of never getting into the playoffs. In 2004, Bill volunteers to coach at Manassas.
“Undefeated” focuses on three players: big and talented O.C., undersized but over-achieving Montrail (“Money”), and anger-issue-having Chavis. The movie chronicles their struggles with each other, as well as with improving both academically and on the football field.
As an archetypal character in an archetypal tale, Money has a particularly compelling story. The groundbreaking sports documentary “Hoop Dreams” has one of these little guys who’s too small for the game but has a huge heart. So does “More Than a Game,” the film made about LeBron James’s high school basketball team. Of course, the king of this archetype is the 1993 football film “Rudy.”
The little men in big-man sports have to come to terms with the truth that what they love is just not going to be theirs in this lifetime. They have a choice of living their lives with wounded hearts and feeling that life is unfair, or letting go and moving on. Money moves on in a way that makes one believe in magic.
