While I'm not much of a sports fan, I do enjoy watching sports movies. There's just something about watching an underdog beat the odds and take the necessary risks on the road to success that just makes me feel good. I know I'm not alone in this. Otherwise, there wouldn't be much of a market for movies like "Cinderella Man," "Seabiscuit" or "The Natural."
That's what filmmakers tried to do with "The Rocket," a movie about the career of legendary hockey player Maurice Richard and the racism against French Canadians both in sports and in regular society, during the forties and fifties. Technically, "The Rocket" is a pretty good piece of work, with great music, lovely, rich cinematography and a good story. But due to some seriously weak writing, the movie never really takes off.
What "The Rocket" mainly suffers from is relying on telling more than showing. We are only shown vignettes of Richard's life, and these chunks of narrative are stretched almost too far apart to be strongly connected. If the filmmakers wanted the audience to be paying attention for the 124-minute running time, they should have been paying more attention to continuity.
Also, we don't actually get to see much of Richard's particularly great games. The facts of these supposedly spectacular displays of athleticism are instead told to us by fans, reporters, and (in a particularly irritating example) Richard's barber who describe the action in long monologues that I somehow doubt would have been used by those people in reality. I'd rather have seen the actual games being played out than listened to the implausible lines spoken about them.
Another result of this cut-and-paste style of storytelling is that the characters aren't given much of a chance to develop. Richard's relationship with his teammates is never explored, and the conflict with his blue collar brother-in-law doesn't get much attention either. The characters don't even seem to change much. Richard is stoic and modest, his wife is always concerned but proud of her husband, and Mr. Irvin, Richard's coach, is always an enigmatic, reverse-psychology dependent S.O.B. While these details might not have seemed important to the people making the movie, they are just as instrumental as any action sequence.
All of this may sound kind of hypocritical when I complain about the lengthy running time (two hours and four minutes is a long time for me to watch bad screenwriting), although it probably could have been avoided had there been more action and less talk. "The Rocket" after all, is a sports movie. Why don't we get to see more sports?