'The Boys in the Boat' review: Clooney navigates mostly gentle waters

Dec. 20—Perhaps George Clooney had no interest in adding to your holiday stress.

A Christmas Day release, the Clooney-directed "The Boys in the Boat" tells the tale of the 1936 University of Washington rowing team, which competed at the Summer Olympics in Berlin.

It does so in an old-fashioned, relatively low-conflict approach, resulting in a movie-viewing experience that is both easy to digest and at least a little underwhelming.

Based on Daniel James Brown's 2013 bestselling book of the same name, "The Boys in the Book" begins by introducing us to the mild-mannered and generally quiet Joe Rantz (Callum Turner), who years ago was abandoned by his father and stepmother and now, during the Great Depression, lives in a shanty town in Seattle. He attends UW, aiming for a career as an engineer, but he's struggling to pay tuition.

Joe's pal Roger Morris (Sam Strike, "American Outlaw") suggests they try out for the rowing team, as a place on the unit would come with food, lodging and enough money to pay the university.

"All you gotta do is make the team," the much more talkative Roger says. "How hard can that be?"

Cut to them standing among many other young men with the same thought.

Coach Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton, "Thirteen Lives") tells those gathered the experience in front of them — conditioning work leading up to actual rowing tryouts — will be incredibly taxing and that there's no shame if their bodies aren't up to it. Clooney then treats us to a montage of pushups, sit ups — even log cutting. (This is Washington State, after all.)

When eight men work as one in a boat, Ulbrickson tells the hopefuls, that rowing "is more poetry than sport."

Eight men, including Joe and Roger, as well as an alternate, are selected for the junior boat — essentially the junior varsity squad behind the seasoned UW Seniors, who are slated to vie for the Olympic opportunity against counterparts from a few other schools.

However, after replacing the junior crew's coxswain — the man at the front of the boat, who sits back to the water and barks out pace-based commands and motivational statements — with the more commanding Bobby Moch (Luke Slattery, "The Post") and achieving the desired improvement, Ulbrickson starts to have ideas about taking his all-important shot with the younger boys instead.

And thus we have a series of obstacles, including but not limited to, besting the seniors, the other schools — including East Coast universities with proud rowing traditions — and then other countries, Nazi Germany among them, for Joe, Roger, Bobby and the boys to overcome before bringing home the gold for the United States.

Meanwhile, Ulbrickson must fend off doubters — namely the boosters who hold great sway over the program thanks to their checkbooks — and leans on Assistant Coach Tom Bolles (James Wolk, "Mad Men") and wife Hazel (Courtney Henggeler, "Cobra Kai") as he tries to lead his Washington Huskies on a path to glory.

Clooney and writer Mark L. Smith also treat us to a half-hearted romance between Joe and Joy Simdars (Hadley Robinson, "Winning Time"), who went to school together as children and start making eyes with each other in class before Joe is on a course for rowing stardom.

Clooney and Smith collaborated on the underrated early-pandemic-shot post-apocalyptic adventure "The Midnight Sky," but their work here is by-the-numbers stuff. Every choice feels obligatory, down to a subplot in which Joe's behavior threatens to cost him his seat in the boat.

Still, you can't deny the simple charm of "The Boys in the Boat," through which Clooney transports us back to a hard-to-imagine time when people crowded around radios to hear the play-by-play, er, row-by-row call of a big match. (Man, there wasn't much to do in 1936, was there?)

As the lead of this ensemble, Turner ("Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore") is a lot like the film itself: solid but unremarkable. As written, Joe is, while admirable, a rather uninteresting Joe, and we don't want to peg too much of that on the actor.

Clooney, who last year took a break from directing to star alongside Julie Roberts in the romantic comedy "Ticket to Paradise," tends to be hit ("Good Night, and Good Luck") or miss ("Leatherheads") behind the camera, but "The Boys in the Boats" drifts nicely into an acceptable middle. It never stalls, but it also rows only so furiously.

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Most importantly, it accomplishes the goal of shining a light on the boys in that boat — named the Husky Clipper, by the way — who certainly are worthy of some renewed appreciation.

And if Clooney's also provided a movie at holiday time that a whole big family could agree upon, what's wrong with that?

'The Boys in the Boat'

Where: Theaters.

When: Dec. 25.

Rated: PG-13 for language and smoking.

Runtime: 2 hours, 4 minutes.

Stars (of four): 2.5.