Making a good sports movie requires the ability to walk a thin line. These kinds of movies tend to need to pull out emotion in people in order to really resonate. Oftentimes, there also needs to be a way for people to feel as though they could be in the same situation in order to care about the characters. That often means that people need to feel as though someone like Mark Wahlberg is really just an average joe that somehow made it good.
Trying that hard to pull emotion out of people that are there to watch a football movie can sometimes lead to the producers of the directors of the sports movie to go a bit overboard and end up making something quite cheesy. Think of a film like Angels in the Outfield as one that tries to hit its mark but definitely overshoots into the land of the absurd. On the other hand, in the football genre, Sean Astin's Rudy is well known for making grown men cry. While those flicks are on the opposite end of the spectrum, there are plenty of underappreciated football movies out there that are worth seeing that manage to walk the line between sappy and sweet, compelling and over the top. For some reason, these five underappreciated football movies have been largely forgotten over the years.
Invincible
Long before Mark Wahlberg was cast to play Sully in the Uncharted movie, he took on a movie based on an entirely different game. Rather than playing a video game character, he took on the role of real life football player Vince Papale in Invincible. The movie definitely dramatizes it up a bit but it is based on the true story of Papale, who managed to make the Philadelphia Eagles after the team held an open try out under head coach Dick Vermeil.
The team was so bad that it was losing the support of the local fan base and so it did something in order to stoke interest from the community. Papale didn't have an especially long NFL career, but the fact that he had one at all was a story worth telling. Invincible gets lost in the shuffle these days probably because it has been so sanitized and polished. However, Invincible is still a darn good movie about a local guy who made good.
We Are Marshall
Speaking at tugging at the heart strings. We Are Marshall starred Matthew McConaughey as real-life Marshall University head coach Jack Lengyel. Lengyel was hired by the school to literally rebuild the program after a 1970 plane crash killed 37 players, five coaches, two athletic trainers, and the school's athletic director. Unlike most sports movies where the end result is that the team won the big game, this film is really just about showing how Lengyel was able to even put a team on the field after the unimaginable tragedy beset the school.
The film is underrated mostly because it certainly wasn't the best football movie ever, but it was good enough for everyone who likes football movies to give a watch. It will certainly drag the emotions out of anyone watching, especially when the movie focuses on the people who were left behind.
Brian's Song
Brian's Song is the oldest movie on the list of the most underappreciated football movies and that's the biggest reason why it make this list at all. There was a time when this was considered one of those sports flicks that everyone had to watch. As the years have gone by, there has definitely been people forgetting this movie existed. Yet another depiction of a real life story, this movie focuses on Chicago Bears teammates Gale Sayers and Brian Piccolo who shared backfield duties as the team's starting running backs in the 1970s.
Piccolo was a talented player who sometimes even gave Hall of Fame running back Sayers a run for his money when it came to playing time. However, his career was cut short due to a cancer diagnosis. The movie had some heavy hitters as far as stars as Lando Calrisian himself, Billy Dee Williams played Gale Sayers and James Caan played Brian Piccolo.
The Program
James Caan might be best known for his work on The Godfather but it turns out he also had more than one pretty decent football movie in his career. The Program is the only movie on this list that is entirely fictional, though it still manages to find some purchase with football fans. The movie centers on a college football program that has all kinds of different things going wrong with it, including a once-great head coach who is on the hotseat.
There's also a star Heisman-level quarterback who has a ton of personal issues and is also a borderline alcoholic. The program is also beset by players that are taking steroids and boosters that are looking to pay players under the table. Basically, the film takes everything that has ever been wrong about college football and puts all of that on one team. Certainly it's over the top, but there are some good bits to it as well that make it very watchable and underappreciated.
The Replacements
The Replacements is part real-life story and part fiction. Starring The Matrix Resurrections' very own Keanu Reeves as star quarterback Shane Falco, the film centers on when the NFL really did have a player's strike and most of the teams brought in players from outside the league in order to continue to have a season. It appears that the National Football League did not sign off on this movie because Reeves' Falco is not a real character and the team he played for was not Washington.
This movie is all kinds of goofy and certainly isn't striving for pulling at the heartstrings like Brian's Song or We Are Marshall, but it's plenty good for someone looking for a comedy that still has a decent football story. The bonus in this film is that Gene Hackman plays the brilliant head coach who manages to turn the rag-tag bunch of "scabs" into a team that sorta, kinda knows how to play football.