The Pleasure of Six: the Worst Sports Movies of All Time

From Rocky Balboa to When Saturday Comes,
the most cringe worthy sporting movies ever

1) Rocky Balboa
As if the best 63 Rocky movies didn't drive the boundaries of wet sentimentality enough - though in equity the new Rocky's not terrible in a Saturday Night Fever wrong-side-of-the-tracks kind of manner - the closing installment in Sylvester Stallone's Balboa tale crashes manner over the cable. (And that's rather an accomplishment, since Sly single-handedly place a conclusion to the Cold War in Rocky IV by informing Dolph Lundgren that "if I can alter, and you can alter, so everybody can alter. ) Stumbling around apparently higher on botox, Stallone spends his moment mulling over snippets of cod doctrine - "The reality ain't all sunlight and rainbows, it's a really nasty and unpleasant spot" - and comes to the decision that, by losing, one can really get. waiting for it. a winner.Having this robust prospect on living is just as easily, because in this career-wrecking shambles, Stallone appears to conflate his own living with that of his almost renowned on-screen role to such an extent you can't truly say if it's Rocky or Sly who is spouting about how he used to be a challenger.

2) The Football Factory
Some critics have suggested that this yob cavort was a worthy enterprise as it took a non-judgemental feel at the realities of football vandalism. Those who really bothered to see it with their eyes available saw the customary boring glorification and glamourisation of alpha-male posturing and senseless violence. "S'it worf it, Tommy?" asks a none-more-cockernee sound in none-more-cockernee Danny Dyer's lead role's vacant chief. The response being, of class, you must be effing joking, this here is absolute pap. The movie did get one matter going for it, however, in that it spawned the accidentally humorous Sky One documentary series The Real Football Factories, which saw gloriously deluded middle-class player Dyer pretending to have away on, and have on with, firms of thugs partaking in "mass offs" and "decent propah nawty rumbles. You couldn't book the fact that somebody scripted it.

3) When Saturday Comes
Sean Bean (ticking) stars as Jimmy Muir, a working-class (ticking) Sunday-league (ticking) striker (ticking) made better. Muir is haunted (ticking) by the specter of his buddy (ticking) who died downward t'quarry (ticking) and goes away the rails (ticking), as indicated by a flirtation with a stripper (ticking) who has Sheffield United tattoo on her jacksie (ticking. But it all ends easily (ticking) because Muir gets his act jointly (ticking) after being told some house truths (ticking) and facing upward to his responsibilities (ticking); he comes off the terrace (ticking) to grade a hat-trick (ticking) against Manchester United (ticking) in the semi-final of the FA Cup (ticking) with the last a slow-motion punishment (ticking. What much do you need? Mel Sterland as the squad hooligan? Tick! Tick! Tick! Tick! Tick! Tick! Tick! Tick! Tick! Tick! Tick! Tick

4) Any Given Sunday
MOR jazz noodlings swell in the backdrop. Al Pacino, sporting hair like Ted Bovis from Hi-De-Hi, bangs on about how living - and so gridiron - is "just a game of inches. Goons with necks thicker than their heads nod and yell and whoop and shriek. "Hell! Yeah!" "The six inches is in face of your cheek," hollers Pacino. Eh? Y'what? Hold on, sad: Hell! Yeah! "When we make upward all those inches, that's going to have the fucking disagreement between WINNING and LOSING, between LIVING and DYING. " Despite this address being perhaps the almost trite always, some going in the circumstance of the Hollywood blockbuster, up-and-under tacticians Jake White and Sam Allardyce have used recordings and transcripts of it to gee their own teams upward - a country of affairs which gives original significance to the idiom "motivational tools".

5) Escape to Victory
During the German occupation of Ukraine in the second reality warfare, a position mainly comprising players from Dynamo Kiev took on German army teams and thrashed them out of view moment and moment again. Nazi patience snapped after Start, as the squad were known, recorded a 8-0 triumph, and the players were rounded upward by the Gestapo and tormented, sent to labour camps, or shot. By the moment this horrific story had been filtered through the Hollywood scriptwriting procedure, however, Sylvester Stallone was saving a punishment in the last hour and everyone escaped to survive merrily always after. Utter pish, simply partly redeemed by Russell Osman's half-time squad speak, an acting masterclass upward there with Ryan Giggs's early 90s appearances in the Quorn adverts.

6) Tin Cup
There are two good movies about ball - Bull Durham and Field of Dreams - and both superstar Kevin Costner. Every massage parlor's favorite player too stars in this golfing movie, but woefully this specific Costner sports vehicle doesn't take the class. In equity, it's a top-notch slice of feelgood Hollywood fluff - salvation, a passion stake, a brief comedy buddy, what's not to enjoy - but the real golfing tale is risible. A hard-drinking, crowd-pleasing waster who rocks upward out of nowhere and almost wins the US Open? It's not that terrible a thought; trouble is, living is alien than fable, and we all know that what happened in the 1991 USPGA at Crooked Stick knocks Tin Cup into a cocked hat.