American Underdog (film): A fantastic sports biopic

This is a movie about an American football quarterback who was a very unique individual in that his talent was not noticed until much later in his life and he struggled to get involved in the NFL at all. There were a ton of coincidental things that kind of had to happen in order for him to end up making it in life, and boy did he make it.

While non Americans sometimes tend to shy away from sports films about this particular sport, I don't think that anyone needs to have a genuine interest in American football in order to enjoy this. I am not a huge fan of sports in a general sense but you could substitute any sport, even sports I don't understand like curling and cricket and this would still be an amazing story.

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If you follow football at all, you have probably heard the name Kurt Warner before. I recall hearing his name a lot about a decade ago even though I am not really a fan of the sport. I was completely unaware that he had such an interesting backstory though and that is what makes his rise to greatness so amazing. He was not born into a football legacy like so many other stars are, he was part of a broken family of limited means in Iowa, and basically everything was working against him. He had a goal as a child to be in the NFL and due to dedication, learning, and just a refusal to give up, he ended up making it, even though he ended up taking a very long path to get there.

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The film starts out with Kurt Warner getting a snap in the Super Bowl and then it flashes back to when he was a kid staring at the TV while his brother keeps pestering him about how much longer it is going to be because he wants to play Atari.. Haha, this is something odd but if you are around my age you can probably relate to because I didn't even know anyone that had 2 televisions in the 80's so if you had an Atari, you were normally competing with a lot of other people to get to actually use the thing.

They don't dwell on his childhood a great deal but instead fast-forward to when Warner is in college playing football for a little-known team and not even getting to play all that often because his coach doesn't like his playstyle. Warner realizes that even though he gets the job done, he is doing it against the coach's instructions and this is why he is kept on the bench. Warner believes his ideas about playing are better but eventually listens to the coach's advice in order to get more playtime. It is at this point that he realizes that the coach was correct and this improves his game enough to get noticed by NFL scouts and briefly drafted by a team.

The NFL is incredibly competitive, so even though it is the same guy that eventually wins MVP and a Super Bowl, he is released by the team that drafted him and he has to return to doing whatever job he can in order to get by. The foreshadowing and realizing that this guy will one day be the recipient of one of the most lucrative football salaries of all time is pretty fantastic as he is scraping by on food stamps working as a stock boy at a grocery store.

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The really cool aspect of all of this is that it is not a work of fiction. This larger-than-life superstar that is considered one of the best quarterbacks the game has ever known really had nearly resigned himself to a life of middle management and being just a normal dude, but fate had other things in store for him.

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In his spare time he ends up trying out for an arena football team, which is a sport that I barely knew existed. From what I can tell this sport is where people that aren't good enough to play the sport for real go and make a pittance and are very rarely taken seriously by the larger leagues. I don't even know a single pers
that is a fan of arena football although the movie does make it seem like a pretty exciting sport.

The main thing that I enjoyed about this film was the pacing. They keep things moving even though there is a lot of information to get to you in the 90 minutes or so of runtime. They do focus on the love story side of things a bit, but that definitely is not the main focus of it. Also, they kind of hinted at Kurt and his love interest being rather religious individuals, but thankfully the producers didn't use this as some sort of recruiting drive that other religious films are often so guilty of.

When done correctly, sports films can actually be very inspiring because of how ludicrously small anyone's chances are of actually making it in the world of professional sports. The statistics about exactly how small these chances are, are spelled out in the first 5 minutes of the movie, so when you see the rest of this underdog story, it makes it all that much more inspiring.

Should I watch it?

Like I said in the very start of this writeup, you do not need to be a fan of the sport to enjoy this story. Personally, I enjoy stories of triumph for anyone who has the odds stacked against them and even though I don't really follow football or any other sport for that matter, this film does a really good job of explaining exactly how terribly unlikely it was that Warner was ever going to succeed in accomplishing his dream. There's plenty of failure along this long road of his, that's for sure. They don't make and secret about what the ending is but that is just fine. It's an inspiring and eventful ride, and I didn't look at my phone even once while it was on, which is always a sign that what I am watching is good.

_{Strangely, the only place you can stream this as part of a subscription is on FuboTV but it can be rented or purchased for a few dollars on almost all streaming services. It is not available on Netflix}