In a painted-by-numbers, tepid attempt to bring yet another historically based underdog sports story to the screen, director George Clooney’s “The Boys in the Boat” treads water before inevitably sinking into disappointing and forgettable mediocrity.

This isn’t even the first time that Clooney has taken on a similar theme as he previously tackled a sport via a struggling football team in 2008’s “Leatherheads,” in which he also starred. You would think he would at least know what not to do, but as with the previous film, he fails to find the rhythm and the heart at the center of the story.

Steeped in history

Much of this, however, comes down to a milquetoast script by Mark L. Smith adapted from Daniel James Brown’s book about the real 1936 University of Washington crew team. While the true story is interesting — in the middle of the Great Depression, young men from the Pacific Northwest took on the best teams in the country and then the world — the movie fails to connect the humans with the history essay-style film being presented.

One major issue is it focuses on team member Joe Rantz (Callum Turner) who is perhaps one of the more passive protagonists to appear in a sports movie. While things do happen to him and there is some semblance of stakes involved (he lives in his car in a Hooverville area of Seattle and is struggling to make ends meet and pay tuition) he never seems too worried about those possible downturns in his life. Turner’s acting choices feel so distant from the action that he may as well be reading from a phone book.

Joe joins the crew team solely with the intent that it will pay for his tuition as he works to earn a degree in engineering (which is rarely mentioned again after the start of the film).

His teammates, who are facing their own struggles fall to mere placeholders rather than characters, a couple of them doing nothing more than just being in the boat with Joe. But the film doesn’t really care about anyone else besides this handsome and scrappy kid, who I guess is some sort of natural (minus the great score).

Paired with Turner’s lead is the film’s greatest, most underused asset, Joel Edgerton as the quiet, gruff coach Al Ulbrickson, who is sidestepped by poor, repetitious dialogue and another surface-level characterization stemming from the weak script.

Lack of direction

For a sports movie, the stakes never feel that dire. Even Joe’s tuition is easily solved. Save for the Olympics at the end, we see the team row in just two meets/regattas, and easily win both. Perhaps this comes down to a struggle to make rowing look exciting from an outside perspective, although it is obviously a very physically involved sport for the rowers. Considering how a film such as “Macfarland, USA” can make distance running interesting, I think it just comes down to the overall direction.

Clooney is obviously a capable director, especially with period pieces. He was nominated for the Best Director Oscar for “Good Night, and Good Luck” in 2006. Here, though, everything feels so uninspired and so calculated that it loses all of the soul-stirring a good sports movie, or broadly historical film should have.

None of this is to say that it’s so egregiously horrid that it’s unwatchable. It just sits in a more passive viewing experience. The story behind the film is interesting and even as a University of Oregon alumna, which means I should always root against the Huskies, I did find myself still wanting them to win. I just already knew they would.

And yes, it is a historically based movie, so of course I already knew how it would end, but just as I already knew the ending to “Miracle,” it was still exciting with a dash of doubt thrown in to hold the audience in that moment of jubilation when they do emerge victorious. That’s what good sports movies are supposed to do.

“The Boys in the Boat” just floats on by without leaving much more in its wake because we’ve seen this all before, and we’ve seen it done better.

More Information

“The Boys in the Boat”

124 minutes

Rated PG-13 for language and smoking