Review: Cool Runnings (1993)

 Cool Runnings (1993)

Rated PG for mild language and brief violence

Score: 3 out of 5

Based (very loosely) on the true story of the Jamaican bobsled team that competed at the 1988 Winter Olympics, Cool Runnings is, together with The Mighty Ducks and Air Bud, one of the first movies most people think of when they think of Disney's live-action offerings in the '90s, especially their sports movies. It takes the rules of a real-life sport and, in service to making a family comedy, asks how many giggles it can get out of the rules and quirks of that sport, typically by dropping in a weird twist like, say, a dog playing basketball, or in this case, a bunch of guys from a tropical island nation competing in a quintessential cold-weather sporting event. It's a charming movie that still holds up thirty years later, thanks to a very solid cast led by Leon Robinson and the late John Candy in his final film released during his lifetime, as well as a lighthearted sense of humor that knows it's corny and doesn't care. It's kinda shallow and makes mincemeat of the actual history in order to manufacture drama for its heroes to overcome (there's a reason why "Disneyfication" has been a joke for decades now), but it's a fun, funny sports movie with an interesting hook and some great moments to back it up.

Our protagonists Derice Bannock, Yul Brenner (no relation to the actor), Junior Bevin, and Sanka Coffie are four Jamaican guys who, thanks to some comic mishaps, wind up forming the first Jamaican Olympic bobsled team. Specifically, Derice, Yul, and Junior all dreamed of becoming track stars, but during tryouts for the Olympic national team, Junior tripped and took down Derice and Yul with him, sabotaging all their hopes for the next four years. Derice's friend Sanka, meanwhile, is the best pushcart derby driver in Jamaica, and don't you forget it. Derice, the son of the Olympic champion Ben Bannock, still wants to follow in his father's footsteps, and when he sees a photo of his late father with the former American bobsledder Irving "Irv" Blitzer, who has since retired to Jamaica, he gets the idea to recruit Sanka to form a bobsled team to compete in the upcoming winter games in Calgary, with help from a reluctant Irv (who only agrees because he knew Derice's father) to show them the ropes. Yul and Junior join soon after in order to round out the four-man team, as everybody else at the tryout was scared off by Irv telling them in graphic detail how dangerous the sport was. Up in Calgary, the Jamaicans have to contend with not only the harsh winter weather but also the skepticism and hostility of the other teams and the officials wondering what these four tropical dudes are doing here, while Irv has to grapple with the circumstances that forced him to retire from bobsledding in disgrace back in 1972, circumstances that do nothing to lessen the suspicion that the rest of the Olympic Village (not least of all his former American teammates) has of him and his team.

The Jamaicans all fit into recognizable "family movie hero" archetypes. Derice is the straightforward hero, the team leader out on the track who wants to live up to his father's legacy. Junior, meanwhile, is a rich kid who, as his name suggests, lives in the shadow of his own father, a proud self-made man who has planned out a life for him as an investment banker in America, and wants to forge his own destiny for himself. Yul is the tough guy who blames Junior for dashing his dream of becoming a runner and has to learn how to work as part of a team with the rest of the group. Finally, Sanka is the comic relief, about as stereotypical a "Jamaican dreadlocked rasta" as you can get without getting into the kinds of drug humor that, in the '90s especially, would've bumped this movie's rating past a PG. Their individual arcs are all fairly predictable once you realize what each of their conflicts is, as is their conflict as a group about proving themselves in the top-flight world of winter sports, in which the racial subtext is only explicitly stated in one line but is heavily alluded to in how the Jamaicans are seen as outsiders in the Winter Olympics. (A lot of this was largely invented for the movie, as in real life the Jamaicans were actually welcomed by the other teams simply for having what it took to get there in the first place, not least of all by the East German team, who in this film are presented as antagonists because, well, it was the early '90s and we were still celebrating the fall of communism.) Irv, meanwhile, has to confront how his past obsession with winning at all costs set him up for his greatest failure in a cheating scandal that took his teammates down with him, with Derice especially showing him how there can be dignity in walking away as something other than Number One.

It's all pretty basic afterschool special stuff that you'd expect from Disney, but I can't deny that this movie does it well, thanks largely to how good the cast is. Leon Robinson as Derice, Doug E. Doug as Sanka, Rawle D. Lewis as Junior, and Malik Yoba as Yul made the four bobsledders feel disjointed at the start of the film, a divided team that you feel is about to walk into a meat grinder in Calgary, making their growing camaraderie over the course of the film feel earned until they end the film looking and feeling like champions. John Candy, meanwhile, brought both his brand of humor and a surprising amount of gravitas to Irv, a former champion who failed his team once before and, in the course of training the Jamaicans, learns a thing or two from them along the way. The film's sense of humor was a good-natured mix of physical/slapstick comedy and dad jokes, from the Jamaicans' first reaction to Canadian winter weather at the airport to a running gag where Derice asks Sanka if he's still alive ("nah, man"), and much of it works thanks to how game the entire cast is for all of it. I watched this movie with my father on my birthday as a nostalgic throwback, to my childhood for me and to his "dad years" for him, and even without any children around, this movie did a very good job of making me feel like a kid again.

The Bottom Line

Cool Runnings is quintessential '90s Disney, a bit too shallow for me to call it one of their best films but still a solid, workmanlike family sports comedy that's elevated by its cast. Whether you're an aging, nostalgic millennial like me, a parent with kids of your own, or both, I recommend checking it out.