Director: Boyd Hicklin
Cast: Stephen Curry, Brendan Cowell, Pallavi Sharda, Damon Gameau
Running time: 91 minutes
Plot: Cricket obsessive Teddy (Brown) gets to live his boyhood dream of playing internationally when he lies his way onto a tour India with his team of hapless friends.
Like many genres, the sports movie plays by a set of familiar rules, and mostly treads what can be a winning (if not predictable) formula. From ROCKY, through TEEN WOLF, and even to last year’s WARRIOR, the sports film holds few surprises: competitor is issued a challenge, trains, fails, finds the power within, and eventually knocks it out of the park. What sets the successful sports movie apart from tall the others is the finer details: engaging characters, wit, and ambition. Unfortunately, SAVE YOUR LEGS! has these in only very small doses, and fails to rise above the most mediocre of sporting movies.
Things begin well, and whilst it’s clear we’ve seen it all before, everything seems inoffensive enough: the performances are perfectly fine, the script is mildly amusing, and the promise of madcap cricket shenanigans actually quite intriguing for a short while. However, by the time proceedings fall into ‘Delhi belly’ gag territory, it’s all to obvious SAVE YOUR LEGS! is a one-trick pony, and one that’s been walked around the course so many times it’s ready for a trip to the glue factory.
Though there’s nothing wrong with a bit of predictability in the movies – let’s face it, Hollywood has been peddling the same stories for over a century – SAVE YOUR LEGS! pushes it to unacceptable levels, resulting in a tiresome and uninspiring affair, following an almost identical plot to 1998 rugby ‘comedy’ UP ‘N’ UNDER (any film that draws such a comparison needs to take a long, hard look at itself in the mirror). And by the Bollywood musical number at the end is just baffling.
SAVE YOUR LEGS! – for the want of a better phrase – just isn’t cricket.
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