My wife and I like (good) sports movies, and we like “horse movies,” so we were very excited to catch a sneak preview of Secretariat at the Union Square. Coming right on the heals of viewing The Social Network earlier that afternoon, it was such a relief to watch a film that dealt with human emotion, and had female characters with brains and dignity. Watching Diane Lane “save the farm” was just what I needed to get Mark Zuckerberg and his army of demeaned women out of my head. But really Secretariat was not very good, and in retrospect they definitely missed their chance to make a great sports movie.

They violated the first rule of sports movies: sports movies need dialog about the details of the sport! They also need to show (with a lot of detail) the training and preparation, and they need to film the sports action straight up – no slow-mo, and no fancy camera shit (the quintessential example of fancy camera shit: the final shot on goal in Bend It Like Beckham, from the perspective of the ball!) In Secretariat, there’s really no interesting stuff about the training, and the races are dumbed down to a generic tale of “good vs. evil,” which got tiresome and was unnecessary.  They do put in a little about choosing the jockey, but it comes off as a bit perfunctory. And while the race scenes could have been filmed a lot worse, they leaned too much on in-your-face CGI views of the action, which of course lessened the impact of the races considerably.

They also missed a lot of neat little things about the races themselves. They failed to point out that the Derby record still stands as well, and that he ran each fifth of a mile faster than the last, something that I think has never been duplicated at Churchill Downs. At the Preakness, they failed to adequately capture the incredible moment where Secretariat (with no prompting from his jockey) moves from last to first on the first turn, and also failed to mention the controversy over whether he actually still holds the Preakness record as well. They do an okay job with the Belmont (it’s kind of hard to screw that one up,) but they manage to ruin the climatic moment with a very bad choice of music and, you guesses it, the dreaded slow-mo.

(By the way, I recommend viewing the three races on YouTube – 4o years later, they are still very thrilling.)

The film is also really sloppy in its attempts to develop human-interest subplots. The sexism of the racing world directed at Penny Chenery was done in a clunky way. Chenery’s relationship with her daughters (together with the eldest daughter’s hippie-leanings and “Peace Pageant”) was distracting and unsatisfying. Her marriage is given a lot of screen time, but you really don’t learn or see much of interest. It all feels rather forced and overdone – all this shit could have been reduced to three really well-written scenes, freeing up time to concentrate on the main attraction.

As far as the actors go, I thought Malkovich was good as Lucien Laurin – in my opinion, he really glued the whole movie together with his performance. Diane Lane was a little flat as Penny Chenery, but it all fairness she was not working with a very good script.

Secretariat comes across very much like a made-for-TV movie, and there is nothing wrong with that. It has its heart in the right place, and is not a bad film. It just could have been so much more.