‘The Mighty Macs’ is Laughably Derivative

“The Mighty Macs,” a G-rated portrayal of Immaculata College’s successful run for the American Association Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) basketball championship in 1972, was produced in 2009, but is only now making its way into theaters more than two years later. It is doubtful, however, that this delay was due to studio infighting or lawsuits or any sort of interesting behind-the-scenes drama. More likely, someone just left the film on a shelf and forgot about it. The oversight would make sense, since “The Mighty Macs” is one of the most incredibly forgettable sports movies to be released in quite some time.

The film stars Carla Gugino as Cathy Rush, the new basketball coach at Immaculata, a Catholic all-women’s college. Rush has no previous coaching experience, but by stringing together nearly every sports movie trope ever conceived, she is able to—spoiler alert—lead her underdog team to a national championship. Along the way, the film features subplots about her over-emphasized troubled marriage to her husband Ed (David Boreanaz) as well as inconsequential culture clashes with the austere nuns who run the school.

But in actuality, the movie is just a collage of clichés compiled by writer-director Tim Chambers. Here they are:

First, the school is very poor. We know this because it has only one basketball and no gym, and because one character unsubtly remarks that “it will take an act of God to save this school.”

Second, there is the obligatory nun who is having a crisis of faith. She prays to God for a sign, gets annoyed by the noise of the basketball practice interrupting her supplications, then realizes that the practice is the sign and becomes the assistant coach.

Third, the team’s coaches make them do drills in unconventional places, “Karate Kid”-style; the assistant coach, the improbably named Sister Sunday (Marley Shelton), predictably tells Cathy that she’s pushing the kids too far.

Fourth, there’s that classic scene where it seems like nobody is going to show up to practice, but then it turns out that the entire team is already inside practicing. Oh, and the team gets really good after a montage!

Fifth, by the end of the movie, the school’s obligatory Mean Nun (Ellen Burstyn) is won over, and shown to be totally on board with the team when she pays for them to get to their final tournament.

Sixth, Cathy has to face off against her old coach who once told her that she wasn’t good enough, and who now happens to be the head of the highest-ranked team in the tournament. And finally, of course, there is that final shot where the basketball arcs in slow motion, all the sound drops out, and then the basketball goes into the hoop and the team wins the championship at the buzzer.

Add to this bevy of banality the fact that the film doesn’t actually seem to know much about basketball. The team has the basics, but Cathy Rush, Esteemed Basketball Coach, doesn’t actually give a lot of specific advice. Her coaching canon consists solely of vague inspirational statements like “We have to stand up for what we believe in!” and “Play our game … We can win this thing!” On the overhead court diagram in the locker room, the assistant coach literally just writes the word “BELIEVE” over it. That is the Mighty Macs’ game plan: believe.

Well, believe it or not, with such spellbinding plotting as this, “The Mighty Macs” is just plain boring. There is never anything at stake—even viewers with absolutely no knowledge of the film’s historical background know that the girls are going to win, thanks to the movie’s heavy-handed previews and storytelling—and there is nothing innovative about how it portrays the value of sports. “The Mighty Macs” is just an ineffectual, inoffensive basketball movie pieced together out of pieces of other, better sports movies. There’s not much else to say about a film whose final line is—I kid you not—“Anything can happen when we’re committed to our dreams.”

—Staff writer Brian A. Feldman can be reached at bfeldman@college.harvard.edu.