Boiled cabbage. Water pie. Stale bread. These are all Great Depression-era foods that Joe Rantz, protagonist of the film “The Boys in The Boat,” might’ve had to eat. They also describe how I feel about the film: the plot is as bland as boiled cabbage, the struggles portrayed feel hollow and watered down, and it overall felt stale and unimaginable.

On Dec. 25, 2023, “The Boys in The Boat,” directed by George Clooney and adapted from a book of the same name, was released in theaters. It tells the mostly true story of the University of Washington rowers that represented the U.S. in the men’s eight event, a rowing category with eight one-oared rowers and one coxswain, at the 1936 Olympics, hosted in Berlin as the world was on the brink of starting World War II. As a coxswain myself, I was impressed at how accurately the sport was depicted, but not only is the plot repetitive and lackluster, the film feels insincere in its attempt to depict sensitive and serious themes.

Set during the tail end of the Great Depression, Joe Rantz (Callum Turner) is a student at the University of Washington struggling to pay his tuition. Through fellow student Roger Morris (Sam Strike), he learns that the rowing team is offering a job to athletes who join. He and Morris, as well as six other working-class boys, make it on the team. Through lots of practice and under the guidance of various authority figures, the boys eventually beat out the varsity boat and qualified for the Olympics where they defeated Germany and won gold.

The plot is as unremarkable as nearly every other sports film: A boy discovers talent for sport. The boy joins a team of scrappy underdogs. The scrappy underdogs win, despite odds being stacked against them. But what redeems the film is that the rowing is actually quite true to life. The actors all learned how to row prior to filming, and you can tell. Their rowing forms were decent–there was even a shot in the beginning that shows Rantz’s hands covered in blisters which, if you’ve ever looked at a rower’s hands (don’t), you’ll know is far too accurate.

The film also honored the importance of a good coxswain, the short people that kind of just sit and yell, and included scenes that showcased how coxswain Bobby Moch (Luke Slattery) helped the rowers improve during practice by…sitting there and yelling. Which happens to be exactly what I do every day! So, 10/10 for accuracy.

While a lot of thought was put behind showcasing rowing authentically, that can’t be said about much else, including the actual racing. Hollywood loves an underdog story, especially those stories where the team manages to turn a loss around midway through the race and win. Clooney apparently loves the story format so much that he used it three times. Each time the margins grow, from believable, to iffy, to physically impossible. The problem isn’t that the boys lag behind at first only to catch up later, because that’s a real strategy that real crews use, or that the boys are underdogs, because they were. But instead, it’s frustrating how one cheap plot point is used over and over as a crutch.

Another sticking point is how emotionally shallow the film is. Without any manipulation of fact, Joe Rantz, along with everyone else from his boat, already had a fascinating and heartbreaking story of success in spite of his rough childhood and the poverty he faced. All of this was already depicted in the book. The only thing Clooney had to do was depict this story with the same amount of precision and sensitivity he took to depicting the sport of rowing. He did not, and instead all the film has to offer is a handful of corny quotes, all mumbled by Turner with the same amount of emotion as a brick wall.

On its own, The Boys in The Boat is a somewhat disappointing, but not awful, film. It faithfully depicts the sport of rowing and presents a classic underdog story to the audience. But take into account any outside context, and the film suddenly crumbles apart. In his effort to make an accurate sports movie, Clooney completely overlooked a much better and more heartfelt movie he could’ve been making about the journey of these nine Olympians.