The Mighty Macs

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The Mighty Macs had so much potential to be a really great film, and I was excited by the trailer. I was disappointed, but not surprised, that it turned out to be chock-full of cliches.

Cathy Rush has been a stay-at-home wife for all of the few months she’s been married, but in her glory days at West Chester State, she played basketball. Wanting to do something with her life, she takes a job coaching the girls’ team at Immaculata College, a tiny, Catholic, all-girls’ school run by nuns that has no gym and only one basketball. Based on a true story, The Mighty Macs tells the triumphant tale of a small, off-the-map school taking on the first annual women’s college basketball national championship playoffs.

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(Slight spoilers may follow. But you won’t really be missing out on anything, because if you’ve seen any sports movie, you’ve seen this movie.)

The characters in this movie are flat and stale. Cathy Rush is your typical hard-as-nails basketball coach with unusual coaching methods and a brisk, no-nonsense attitude. For the first half of the movie, she was rude and kind of mean, and even made the girls practice defense drills in a drainage pipe. I almost instantly hated her character, but then she has an inexplicable change of heart halfway through the film and softens up a bit. This sudden change in character is confusing, but very welcome, as it makes the entire film much more bearable when the main character isn’t a complete jerk.

The players on the Immaculata team all blend together in my mind, with the exception of Trish, the hotshot player who has to hitchhike to school and wear overalls 24/7 because her family can’t afford anything else, and Lizanne, who wears her boyfriend’s letterman jacket 24/7 because she loves him so much. I think everyone else had names, I just don’t remember them because they’re all the exact same character. Good sports movies thrive on memorable characters that get the audience excited to root for them at their games, and cheer them on even through their losses. Unfortunately, The Mighty Macs accomplishes none of that by making the team only semi-exciting, and the individual players even less interesting.

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The best character is Sister Sunday, a nun recruited by Rush to be her assistant coach. She’s funny, spunky, and not afraid to get her hands dirty, shouting at players from the sidelines and making snarky comments while drinking at a bar. That’s one thing I really appreciated about this movie: nuns are treated with respect, both by the characters and by the screenwriter. The sisters are seen as real people, with real wants and needs and worries, but constantly dedicated to their mission of serving God and others.

The Mighty Macs also does a good job at not being preachy. In fact, there’s only about three mentions of the word “Catholic”, and when Cathy Rush admits to her assistant coach that she actually isn’t Catholic, she’s Baptist, Sister Sunday smiles and proclaims, “Then you are my sister.” There are some great Bible quotes on signs that Immaculata supporters hold up at games, and they’re quirky and perfectly fit for the game at hand.

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Although this film has some good moments and some great scenes (like Rush and Sister Sunday’s candid talk about vocations, and Sister Sunday demonstrating how to play good defense and box out your man, among others), overall The Mighty Macs falls into the category of “just another sports movie”, with generic characters, a generic plot, and a generic script. I’m still waiting for a good girls-in-sports movie. Hopefully it’ll get here soon.