Let us consider the prospects of sports in movies. As this week’s “Lucky You” proves, a game of high-stakes poker can actually be suspenseful. Whether you can make an entire film out of the subject is another matter.
“The Flying Scotsman” turns to bicycle racing, which ought to be more exciting than poker but oddly enough isn’t. This is the true story of a Scot named Graeme Obree, who held the world-record time for a brief moment in the early 1990s but then struggled with his own mental-health demons.
The movie thus goes back to the tradition of “Fear Strikes Out,” the Anthony Perkins biopic of troubled baseball player Jimmy Piersall. But this new movie fails to delve deeply into Obree’s battle with depression (which led to a suicide attempt), instead concentrating on triumphs in the velodrome.
Part of Obree’s appeal as a hero is his amateur status and his homemade approach to the sport. According to the movie, Obree souped up his world-record bike with ordinary objects, including a bearing from a washing machine.
The movie has some nice details like that, the kind of thing that could only come from a true eccentric: Obree’s habit of eating marmalade sandwiches before a race, for instance.
Obree is ably played by Jonny Lee Miller, one of the “Trainspotting” crew. Miller suggests the perpetually distracted look of someone who is driven by forces beyond the usual I-want-to-be-a-winner motivations of sports movies.
Also in the cast is Billy Boyd, famed wee Hobbit from the “Lord of the Rings” movies, as Obree’s loyal trainer, and the ubiquitous Brian Cox, as an Obree supporter.
Obree had real troubles with bicycling’s ruling commission, and yet the movie’s treatment of this still feels like a rigged-up excuse to present some hissable villains. They disapprove of his bike and his posture, and they commit the cardinal sin of calling him an Englishman instead of a Scot.
Bicycling junkies will enjoy the movie, and the Glasgow locations are cool. But there’s something about watching a man bicycle in a circle around a track that is, well, like watching someone bicycle around a track.
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