In East Los Angeles, “The Classic,” the annual football game between high school rivals Roosevelt and Garfield, is a huge deal to the local Latino community.
Veteran editor Billy McMillin (Mike Wallace Is Here; West of Memphis) chronicles both teams’ seasons leading up to the 80th edition of the showdown in The All-Americans, a passable documentary that thinks it’s a powerful activist statement but is little more than a basic youth sports drama.
McMillin assumes that contemporary radio snippets relaying negative opinions about immigrants, plus a few heavy-handed statements from his subjects about the plight of Latinos in the U.S. will incite positive change, yet they more often than not impede the flow of the film’s appealing human-interest stories that they’re meant to augment.
The standout strengths of The All-Americans are the sufficiently compelling, “Friday Night Lights”-style mini-narratives within the overall story arcs, but even with moments of surprising vulnerability from these young men and their loved ones, none are developed to memorable ends, nor are they filmed or presented in noteworthy ways.
The overall effect isn’t nearly the boundary-breaking message of national unity it strives to be. Instead, it’s another well-made high school football documentary that will appeal to fans of the game but have difficulty wrangling viewers who don’t care about sports.
Starts Dec. 6 at Pisgah Film House
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