The Damned United relies almost exclusively on the acting flair of Michael Sheen, and as he possesses incredible electricity on screen this strategy is not a complete failure and makes for a fairly enjoyable movie. But the film suffers from some basic problems. First off, it is pretty clear that Brian Clough was an outstanding coach – you don’t take no-account, provincial teams from the bottom of the second league to the top of the Premier league without some considerable skill, and it has to be more than the skill of his partner Peter Taylor (played by Timothy Spall) in spotting talented young players. But the movie decides to portray Clough as entirely a product of Taylor’s player acquisition, and basically spends no time developing Clough’s construction of the team or his orchestration of the Derby County’s incredible rise to prominence . It’s just not very believable, frankly. This unfortunate portrayal of Clough as a coach is exacerbated by the fact that even the player acquisition is handled somewhat perfunctorily – for instance, they are satisfied with simply showing brief, one off conversations like “we need a midfielder with great feet – let’s get so-and-so” and then presto, you see the team rising in the standings in a half-assed montage. This is fine as far as it goes, but it must be said: it does not make for a very riveting film-watching experience. In fact, it smacks of a certain laziness.

The second problem is that the film cuts back and forth in time between the Derby County rise to power and the 44 days that Clough headed Leeds United, the problem being that the Leeds United section is not very exciting or even interesting. The Leeds players don’t want to play for Clough, period. And so they lose all their games. Nothing else happens! The movie stalls every time we switch back to Leeds, and as Leeds takes up about half the movie this means that the film is in a full stall about half the time. Not a good state of affairs.

The deeper problem here is that The Damned United is really all about Clough’s obsession with his arch nemesis Don Revie, and makes no attempt whatsoever to be a proper sports movie. The problem with this is that Clough’s Revie obsession simply does not support a movie all by itself, at least not the way it was handled in this film. It’s interesting, but they can’t be bothered to dig deep enough to really pull it off, and they certainly can’t pull it off without developing other aspects of the story. So what’s left in the end is a somehwat cartoonish character study and not much else. It’s a shame really – there might have been a really good sports movie in this material.

The Damned United can be recommend just for Sheen’s performance, but the artistic vision of the film is too limited to make it anything more than light entertainment.