Cool Runnings (1993)

User Rating:

6.5/10   

Director:

Jon Turteltaub

Writers (WGA):

Lynn Siefert (story) &
Michael Ritchie (story) ...

Release Date:

1 October 1993 (USA)

Genre:

Adventure | Comedy | Sport

Tagline:

One Dream. Four Jamaicans. Twenty Below Zero.

Plot:

Based on the true story of the First Jamacian bobsled team trying to make it to the winter olympics.

Plot Keywords:

Olympics | Bobsled | Jamaica | Winter Olympics | Airplane

Awards:

2 wins & 2 nominations

Cast

Leon	...	Derice Bannock (as Leon Robinson)
Doug E. Doug	...	Sanka Coffie
Rawle D. Lewis	...	Junior Bevil
Malik Yoba	...	Yul Brenner
John Candy	...	Irving 'Irv' Blitzer
Raymond J. Barry	...	Kurt Hemphill
Peter Outerbridge	...	Josef Grool
Paul Coeur	...	Roger
Larry Gilman	...	Larry
Charles Hyatt	...	Whitby Bevil Sr.
Winston Stona	...	Coolidge
Bertina Macauley	...	Joy Bannock
Pauline Stone Myrie	...	Momma Coffie
Kristoffer Cooper	...	Winston
Bill Dow	...	Registration Official

MPAA:

Rated PG for mild language and brief violence.

Runtime:

98 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English | German | Russian

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby

Certification:

Iceland:L | Peru:PT | South Korea:All | Argentina:Atp | Australia:G | Chile:TE | Finland:S | Germany:o.Al. | Netherlands:AL | Spain:T | Sweden:11 | UK:PG | USA:PG | Singapore:PG

Filming Locations:

Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Company:

Walt Disney Pictures

Trivia:

Contrary to the story in movie, the Jamaican team was met with open arms by the international Bobsledding teams. One of the other teams even when so far as to lend the Jamaican team their back-up sled so they could qualify.

Goofs:

Audio/visual unsynchronized: When Junior is looking in the mirror at the bar, his words don't match with lips.

Quotes:

Irv: All right, Derice. Let me lay out some difficulties for you. Snow: you don't have any. It's nine hundred degrees out there. Time: you don't have any. The Olympics are in three months. And me: you don't have me. As far as I'm concerned, the sport of bobsledding no longer exists. I don't want to do it, I don't want to coach it, and most of all, and I mean most of all, I don't want to be within two thousand miles of anybody who does. Now did you follow all that?

Movie Connections:

Referenced in "Family Guy: The Son Also Draws (#1.6)" (1999)

Soundtrack:

Wild Wild Life

Sweet, disarming film

Hands up all Jamaicans. (There are only 2.6 million people in Jamaica - so I know you don't account for a large percentage of the English-speaking world.) Hands up all those people with any interest at all in bobsledding. Hah! I knew it! No-one.

That's why `Cool Runnings' succeeds. It depends not at all on aggressive nationalism (it couldn't afford to, with a constituency of 2.6 million), and people of all countries are free to participate in the Jamaicans' perfectly reasonable patriotism. (Probably even the Swiss, whose bobsled team comes across as more than a trifle arrogant.) Nor is there any of that worship of a particular sport that makes baseball movies so unendurable for people outside of North America, Cuba and Japan. (Not that I have any evidence that baseball movies are popular in Cuba or Japan.)

There isn't any power-of-positive-thinking psychobabble, either - at least, it doesn't dominate. The four Jamaican bobsledders are separate people with different goals and ways of thinking. The coach (played beautifully by John Candy, who proves that he can act without playing the clown) doesn't ram a particular ideology down his players' throats. I doubt that any sports film has a more civilised and reasonable coach.

It comes down to this: we are given a reason to care about the characters, unrelated to nationality; and we are given a story that's worth following, even if we would never follow the sport itself. The clichés are fewer than usual and never offensive. It's a sweet film, and I doubt there's more than a handfull of people who could resist its charm.