The Boys in the Boat: George Clooney catches a crab with this ruthlessly shallow rowing drama

George Clooney has now directed as many features as David Lynch or Paul Thomas Anderson – nine, to be precise. An awful lot of faultlessly charming Q&As may have greased the wheels, but if we were presented with just the films themselves, teasing out much of an auteur personality would be tough. They tend to be breezy, lightly historical, flyaway affairs; they’re fond of camaraderie filched from Hawks and Sturges; they gesture towards serious themes without having an awful lot to say.

The Boys in the Boat is autopilot Clooney – a pleasant, coddling watch almost ruthlessly shorn of depth or subtext. It is exactly and only an account of the US rowing team’s travails to win gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Based on the book of the same name by Daniel James Brown, it fashions this photo-finish victory as a classic underdog story, a David-vs-Goliath coup for the ages.

Not even Clooney would be quite shameless enough to sell us “America the underdog”, so of course this is working-class America: if you think that’s splitting hairs, he may have a challenge winning you over. These men weren’t Ivy League types, but bootstrappy strivers such as the budding engineer Joe Rantz (Callum Turner), a struggling student at the University of Washington, left to fend for himself in Seattle’s slums from the age of 14.

Recruited, like his teammates, by the exacting coach Al Ulbrickson (a fine, if undertested, Joel Edgerton), Rantz was plucked from total obscurity for America’s Olympic squad, when Ulbrickson made the shock decision to put forward his junior crew, rather than the more experienced rowers he’d been training for years. They had a matter of months to get in shape: cue many a sun-dappled montage of muscles rippling and teeth clenching, to the strains of an Alexandre Desplat score that tinkles as banally as it soldiers on.

“We were never eight – we were one,” muses the older Rantz, a dud insight that unintentionally nails the monotony of the characterisation. His courtship with future wife Joyce (Hadley Robinson) takes up a good chunk of screen time, gliding by with frictionless ease. Turner, with his relaxed charisma, barely seems to break a sweat.

You’d think the journey to Berlin might bristle with portents on some level, but the film essentially keeps blinkers on for efficiency’s sake – not even bothering to mention that the team’s cox, Bobby Moch, discovered his father was Jewish just days before they competed. Jesse Owens gets a half-minute scene, practically an afterthought.

The editor and cinematographer thankfully improve on Desplat’s work in the perfectly polished rowing sequences, but everything adds up to a rousing blandness that Goebbels might have envied. It’s yet another title to chalk up on the roomy blackboard of Clooney’s filmography, among the rubbed-out ghosts of all the rest.

12A cert, 124 min. In cinemas now

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