The protagonist, former professional soccer player Paul Crewe, finds himself behind bars. The ambitious and brutal warden dreams of “pushing” a semi-professional soccer team of his guards into the national championship.
He offers Paul a deal – to arrange an unusual soccer match between a team of convicts and a team of guards with one important condition: the prisoners must lose… in exchange for the early release of Krue. So the game without rules began.
4k movies reviews
A peculiar, unconventional and unusual for its genre film, which is a kind of mix of comedy, crime drama and sports, a genre which can be conventionally described as a ‘Prison movie’. Frankly speaking I expected to see a heavy philosophical prison drama in the style of ‘The Moth’, ‘Cool Hand Luke’ or Somebody Up There Likes Me’, instead I got a rather light and catchy film about the team spirit, the spirit which can be described as ‘One for All and All for One’.
Of course, there are elements of tragedy in the film, and maybe even some of the viewers will find a philosophical component, but overall the film looks like a common, fashionable sports movie of the time about the ‘spirit of victory’, which skillfully veiled comedic components, as well as drama and crime.
– Thirty-four years.
– Thirty-four?
-Yes, the last six and a half in this swamp.
The film is interesting not only because it’s a bizarre synthesis of several genre forms, it’s also interesting because it stars the famous Burt Reynolds, that rebel ‘Bandit’ from the cult comedy ‘Smokey and the Bandit’, Here, too, he appears as this ‘rebel without reason’ – former professional soccer player Paul Crewe, who is jailed for speeding and has spent some time in harsh and gruesome prison conditions, is forced to make a deal with the cruel and dishonest prison commandant – the ultimatum is as follows: He must organize and train a team of prisoners well for a match against the guards’ team in record time, but his ‘charges’ must lose to the ‘Guards’. All in exchange for an early release. Paul faces a difficult choice: to betray his team and get a way out, or win, but lose the key to his imminent freedom.
That’s actually the whole point of the movie, don’t expect from it some supernatural depth of thought or Platonic reasoning about freedom and life, an ordinary movie about ordinary people, ordinary goals and questions, sooner or later asked by any sportsman, though all this is played and realized at an incredibly high level.
Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265 (97.7 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Audio
English: FLAC 2.0
English: Dolby Digital 2.0
Subtitles
English SDH, Bulgarian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Indonesian, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish.
