‘You give me the heart, I’ll give you the lungs, and together we’ll work on the head…’
You can count on one hand the number of films about football that are actually good. The Damned United is one. Mike Bassett: England Manager is another. Beyond that, the pickings are very slim indeed. Bend It Like Beckham is a decent film but a bad football film (the match footage is awful). Fever Pitch holds a place in my heart but it’s nowhere near as good as the novel that inspired it. From there, you arrive at wonderful nonsense like Escape to Victory and When Saturday Comes. Good football films. Bad films. A Shot at Glory falls firmly into the latter category…
I should begin by saying none of this makes sense. Robert Duvall plays Gordon McLeod, the manager of struggling Scottish lower league side Kilnockie. His accent is as inconsistent as his team’s performances. Michael Keaton plays the hotshot American owner who is considering moving the team to Dublin for reasons best known only to himself. Ally McCoist, not an actor by any stretch of the imagination, plays the ageing striker Jackie McQuillan, who signs for Kilnockie… who knows why? It’s best not to think too deeply about any of it. Just to make things even more unnecessarily complicated, McQuillan is married to McLeod’s daughter, Kate (Kirsty Mitchell), but he also shags about a lot. Even more bizarrely, also on the Kilnockie team is Cole Hauser from Yellowstone, and… erm… former Bolton Wanderers manager Owen Coyle. Oh, and Mark Knopfler does the music, obviously. What a strange film.
Once you get over the shock of Robert Duvall from the Godfather trilogy sharing the screen with A Question of Sport‘s Ally McCoist, it soon becomes clear that this is all pretty straightforward Roy of the Rovers stuff. Structurally, it’s very similar to When Saturday Comes: boggy pitches, pints after the game, a few punch-ups. The main difference here is the absolutely baffling conclusion of this film. Think Rocky rather than Rocky II.
While I can’t imagine anyone who isn’t an avid football fan finding much to enjoy here, I would urge anyone interested in the beautiful game to give it a try. Bad film. Good football film.
