In a sentenceThree sprinters, a pushcart champion, a bathtub on wheels and John Candy at his quietest; we knew every turn and did not mind
Jamaica. Derice Bannock (Leon Robinson), a sprinter whose father ran at the Olympics, loses his place in the trials when Junior Bevil (Rawle D. Lewis) stumbles and brings him and Yul Brenner (Malik Yoba) down with him. Derice finds a photograph of his father with Irv (John Candy), an American who once drove bobsleds and now takes bets in a bar on the island. He decides Jamaica will send a bobsled team to the Winter Olympics in Calgary and recruits his friend Sanka Coffie (Doug E. Doug), a pushcart champion who has never seen snow, along with the two men who fell with him. Irv has to be talked into coaching, and training starts in a bathtub on wheels pushed down a hill.
Jon Turteltaub’s underdog comedy about the Jamaican bobsled team is corny, loosely true and built from spare parts, and it works anyway. John Candy, playing it quiet, is the reason, along with four leads who refuse to be the joke.
Jon Turteltaub’s film takes a true story that sounds like a joke, a Jamaican bobsled team at the Winter Olympics, and builds the most conventional underdog comedy it can around it. There is a disgraced coach, a rich boy with a disapproving father, a joker, a hard man and a sled painted in the national colours. Three writers share the screenplay, Lynn Siefert, Michael Goldberg and Tommy Swerdlow, with Siefert and Michael Ritchie credited for the story, and you can feel all of them agreeing that nobody should be surprised by anything. It reached British cinemas on 25 February 1994, it runs 98 minutes, and it goes exactly where you expect. We liked it a good deal more than that sentence suggests.
The four leads are the first reason. Leon Robinson plays Derice as a man who cannot picture not getting what he wants, and there is not a wink in the performance. Doug E. Doug’s Sanka has most of the jokes and plays them to his friends rather than to the camera. Rawle D. Lewis gives Junior a clipped, careful voice you can hear the father in, and Malik Yoba’s Yul Brenner, who keeps a picture of Buckingham Palace in his pocket, is the only one who seems to know the sport can hurt. The film lets them look foolish in a sled. It does not, mostly, ask us to laugh at where they come from.
John Candy is the second reason and the better one. Irv has lost his career and most of his self-respect and has stopped minding about either, and Candy plays him low and slow, with no pratfalls and hardly a raised voice. He is heavier and sadder here than the man who sold shower-curtain rings in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, and he lets the team’s noise go on around him without trying to match it. There is a conversation late on, which we will not detail, in which he tells Derice what a medal is worth and what it is not, almost in a murmur. It moved us more than a PG sports comedy has any business doing, and it did because Candy declined to sell the moment.
Phedon Papamichael shoots Jamaica in hot, saturated greens and yellows with the sea behind everything, then drops the team into a Calgary of white sky, grey concrete and strip lighting, so the cold looks colder for having seen the island first. Bruce Green cuts the runs from inside the sled, walls of ice slamming past at the edge of the frame, and they are the most exciting thing in the film; we gripped the arm of the sofa, and we had seen them before. Hans Zimmer puts steel pan and a reggae bassline under his rising strings, and the score knows to the second when to swell.
The flaws are the genre’s. The villains come off a shelf: Raymond J. Barry’s Kurt Hemphill is a committee man whose one trait is wanting the Jamaicans gone, and Peter Outerbridge’s Josef Grool is an East German who sneers in close-up. Bertina Macauley, as Derice’s wife Joy, gets a few scenes of encouragement and is then left on the island. There is a stretch in Calgary where the team tries to drive like the Swiss and has to learn to drive like themselves, and the lesson arrives when the schedule says it should. The story is based, loosely, on a real team, and the film’s interest in what actually happened stops at the premise. We laughed at Sanka shivering as he stepped off the plane, and then felt a little ashamed of ourselves, because the joke was built on nothing but the thermometer.
Set against the films it borrows from, it is a long way from The Bad News Bears, which Michael Ritchie directed in 1976 and which was a good deal less kind to its losers. Most critics have been about as warm as we are. The ones who called it predictable and the ones who called it cheering were both right.
The finish is the part people remember, and we will not describe it except to say that the film gets there without a speech, which after everything before it counts as restraint. Watch it on a wet Sunday afternoon with somebody under twelve, and let them believe you do not know how it ends.
Most critics like Cool Runnings, and nobody dislikes it. The praise gathers around John Candy, whose performance several reviews single out as more thoughtful and more touching than the broad comedy around him would suggest. The bobsled runs themselves get credit, and most reviews agree that the true story of a Jamaican team at the Winter Games carries the film a long way. The warmer notices call it a feel-good comedy that works for any age.
The reservations are about predictability. Radio Times finds it patronising in places, and Empire thinks it corny and less funny than it promises, though both still come down on its side. The spread is narrow: nobody goes lower than the mid-sixties, and the most enthusiastic review, from Digital Spy two decades after release, argues that the film has lasted and that its ending still lands. Two of the seven reviews could not be fully read, so the picture rests on five.
The critic finds it a sweet-natured, high-spirited comedy that works for all ages. He particularly praises John Candy’s complex performance and the film’s exhilarating bobsledding sequences.
Read the full review →The critic finds the film highly entertaining, warm, and broadly appealing. They praise its balance of humor, emotion, and insight, along with John Candy’s poignant performance.
Read the full review →Parkinson calls it a hugely entertaining, cheering underdog comedy, though he finds it predictable and sometimes patronising. He praises its feel-good storytelling and the appeal of its unlikely true-story premise.
Read the full review →Errigo finds the film corny and less funny than it promises, but ultimately a pleasing feel-good story. She singles out the engaging performances as the main reason its heartwarming tale works.
Read the full review →The accessible page does not reveal the critic’s verdict. Its URL headline refers to four unlikely Olympians, but the review text is unavailable.
Read the full review →The available page identifies this as a review, but its verdict cannot be determined from the accessible material. The standfirst highlights the unlikely Jamaican bobsled team and Hollywood’s adaptation of their true story.
Read the full review →
Eddie the Eagle · not reviewed yetAnother hopeless Winter Olympian, another drunk coach, and Britain’s turn to be laughed at kindly.
The Bad News Bears · not reviewed yetMichael Ritchie’s losers’ comedy, meaner and funnier than anything that borrowed from it.
Bend It Like BeckhamHounslow football, a disapproving family and a lead who will not be talked out of it.
Shaolin Soccer · not reviewed yetStephen Chow’s Hong Kong underdogs, with kung fu, and the slapstick this film only hints at.
Breaking AwayIndiana cyclists, class resentment and a bicycle race we still think about.
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