Angelo Pizzo's My All-America

My All-American is an upcoming sports biographical film starring Finn Wittrock in the lead role as Freddie Steinmark, a short safety for the University of Texas during their remarkable 1970 National Championship season. This film is directed by Angelo Pizzo, the writer for sports classics such as Rudy and Hoosiers, and also stars Aaron Eckhart, Robin Tunney and Sarah Bolger in the roles of Darrell K Royal, the University of Texas football coach, Gloria Steinmark and Linda Wheeler, Freddie Steinmark's girlfriend, respectively. The film follows the story of Steinmark from a young boy to his eventual rise as one of the best players on the University of Texas football team. Along the way however, Pizzo tries unsuccessfully to make you care about the supporting cast of characters by jumping around scenes to quickly to flesh out interesting ones. Even his own mother, played by the talented Robin Tunney, barely has any interaction with
Freddie. And Robin Tunney is on the poster for the film. Every relationship involving Freddie Steinmark in this film is forced and not naturally developed. This film also never really gets any real conflict until it’s too late to salvage the film.
Since Steinmark is displayed as a perfect person, both on and off the field, it becomes difficult to imagine him failing in any of his endeavors. In his early high school career as a football player he was a star running back getting around 5 touchdowns a game, and as soon as he gets to college he becomes the starting safety and achieves instant success. This leads to a very slow and boring first and second act of the film since all we see during this time is how good of a person Steinmark is. And at times, the film even seems to forget what the story is actually about. The film is about Freddie Steinmark and in order for it to succeed, it must show us Freddie Steinmark. Though for some reason when the University of Texas football team shows up on the screen Freddie is forgotten in many scenes and this makes it even harder to develop any emotional attachment to the main character since the film itself almost wants you to forget about
him. Despite a very weak first and second act, the film does eventually start to pick up in finale. However, the success of the third act depends entirely on how emotionally attached one is to the characters and due to absolutely horrible character development, the odds are that one will not care about what happens to the characters. As a result, the only positive thing about this film is undermined due to the poor quality of the rest of the film. My All-American is a generic sports film with very little to offer. Pizzo is completely out of his element throughout the film as he struggles to find what to film and how to film it. If you are dying to watch a sports film this fall you would be better off watching Rudy. I'd give this film 2 out of 5 stars and would not hold it against you if you opted to spend money on the new James Bond film, which comes out a week earlier, over this atrocity.