Rudy is a 1993 football film based on the true story of Daniel “Rudy” Ruettiger. My sister has been talking about this movie for as long as I can remember. She played the music for it in middle school and thought this was a good movie. In truth I don’t think she remembered much about it. She watched it with me and boy is it a long two hours. The movie has great music, nothing gets me excited like motivational synth. And of course seeing Samwise Gamgee in another role is also a treat. We quickly learn that Rudy is obsessed with the Notre Dame football team, and I mean obsessed. He can quote game commentary word for word. Unfortunately, it seems Rudy has little athletic ability, despite his great passion and drive. We see him over the course of many years. He doesn’t have the grades to get in to Notre Dame, and so he joins his father working at the steel mill. He stays for years until an accident kills his best friend. Rudy heads out to Notre Dame right from his friend’s funeral to follow his dream of playing on their team. Well, he still doesn’t have the grades to get in, so he spends the next two years at a catholic school working on his grades with Jon Favreau. Finally Rudy gets to Notre Dame and where he gets to be on the football team as a glorified practice dummy. Despite working harder than everyone else, Rudy is not permitted to play in a game because he’s just not good enough. Eventually his team comes around to liking him and all put down their jerseys on their coach’s desk, saying “for Rudy”. They then still have to chant Rudy’s name for several minutes before the coach concedes to let Rudy play a whopping ten seconds of the game. Rudy gets a tackle and his team carries him off the field on their shoulders. 

Throughout the film, Rudy’s family does not support him or believe in him. Rudy’s longtime serious girlfriend breaks up with him at his best friend’s funeral when Rudy can’t let go of his dream. She then dates one of Rudy’s brothers and has the nerve to come to Christmas at his family’s home. The whole movie, Rudy just wants to make his family proud and to prove himself to them, while they’re being the worst. His dad was okay sometimes, but his brother Frank is just so awful. I enjoyed Rudy’s school friend D-Bob and I loved the football groundskeeper, Fortune, that Rudy befriended. I was calling him Rudy’s real dad. He actually cares for Rudy and roots for him and helps him when he’s down. He reminds Rudy of what’s important.

The romantic aspect of the movie was very slight. D-Bob wanted Rudy to introduce him to girls in exchange for his tutoring services. It then shows a lot of girls ignoring Rudy while he tries to get their attention. I loved that when the girls said “no”, it was actually respected. This is something that is too often disrespected, “oh she’s just playing hard to get”, “keep trying bud, she’ll change her mind”. A woman’s “no” gets taken as a challenge, when it really should just be taken for an answer. After a while of Rudy doing the “my friend thinks your cute” thing, they get a girl coming up to them to do this same thing to D-Bob, for the “weird girl”, which of course just means a girl wearing glasses and a ponytail. D-Bob does end up with her though which I thought was nice. Rudy has a little thing with Mary Mcdonald who is the self proclaimed biggest Notre Dame football fan of all time. When she said that I went “ope, there’s his wife”. It’s unclear whether they get together, but they have a few sweet moments and we end with it still sort of in the budding phase.

Overall, while there were aspects that I liked, this movie wasn’t a big win for me. I liked Fortune, Rudy, and D-Bob, and I liked the music, I liked a lot of individual scenes. As a whole however, it felt like way too much struggle and fight to be fun anymore. I felt like Rudy was getting knocked down at every turn. Like Chumbawamba, he always got back up again, but it was only to get knocked down again. No matter what he did, his family wouldn’t believe in him, and later his coach wouldn’t play him. He just kept getting the short end of the stick. At times it felt like he was being singled out for no reason to get picked on. Then when we finally get our pay off in the end, it wasn’t really earned, it was them doing him a favor. Because despite Rudy working harder than anyone else, he still didn’t have the athletic ability to get the spot on his skill. It was his teammates finally coming around to liking him and getting their coach to let him run out with them and then relentlessly chanting his name towards the end to get him in the game for a few seconds. So we end with that: Rudy still isn’t good enough, but his teammates and coach did him a favor. It’s tough. Can’t this guy just get a win? It’s treated like that was his big win and oh look isn’t that so great, but to me it just didn’t feel great. It was nice to see D-Bob cheering for him and his family finally supporting him, but I just would’ve liked to have seen Rudy get on the team for his own merit. He worked so hard for so many years to get on that team, let the kid play. And who decided to show this to middle schoolers? It’s long, pretty slow, and has no good pay off. Middle schoolers would be so bored watching this, and there are so many better options. I’m sorry Rudy, you deserved better.