Watch Undefeated (2012) Movie Online Free Stream
Set in the inner-city of Memphis, Undefeated chronicles the Manassas Tigers' 2009 football season, on and off-the-field, as they strive to win the first playoff game in the high school's 110-year history.A perennial whipping boy, in recent decades Manassas had gone so far as to sell their home games to the highest bidder, but that all changed in the spring of 2004 when Bill Courtney, a former high school football coach turned lumber salesman, volunteered to lend a hand.When he arrived, the team consisted of 17 players, some timeworn equipment and a patch of grass masquerading as a practice field.
Focusing more on winning young men than football games, the football program nevertheless began resurrecting itself and, in 2009, features the most talented team Manassas has ever fielded; a team that seems poised to end the playoff jinx that has plagued the school since time immemorial.
Coach Bill Courtney calls his Manassas Tigers a second-half team. It’s an accurate description for many reasons beyond the football squad’s trouble scoring early in the game, but one that specifically applies to the film made about them by Dan Lindsay and TJ Martin for it is in the second half that “Undefeated” transcends the traditional sports doc.
Of course, documentaries always require a bit of luck no matter how skilled the filmmakers are and in the case of “Undefeated,” it’s actually the bad luck of Montrail “Money” Brown, an undersized right tackle who suffers a torn ACL midway through his senior season, which sets off a series of alternately heartbreaking and inspiring moments during a year of football no one could’ve expected.
Ironically, it’s expectations that held me back from immediately embracing “Undefeated” as something special. In reports that the film had been sold at SXSW to the Weinstein Company, a common refrain was a comparison to “The Blind Side” due to one of its storylines and it bears a strong resemblance to “Friday Night Lights” in its aesthetic and, to some degree, its structure before the exceptionally compelling story of the lower-class North Memphis squad takes over.
Lindsay and Martin’s film is full of the extreme close-ups and impressionistic editing that Peter Berg employed for the gritty style that has become code in contemporary cinematic terms for any sports film these days being about “more than just a game,” which poses the intriguing if problematic conceit in a documentary that faux reality has replaced the actual thing in order to be engaging. However, “Undefeated” has no shortcomings in the charm department thanks to the other way the film is like “Lights,” as it’s told primarily from the perspective of its coach, Courtney, the owner of a hardwood lumber company who volunteers at a local high school because football is his true passion.
Undeniably charismatic with a tough love approach towards his players, Courtney has spent six years changing the culture at Manassas from a program that could barely afford uniforms and rarely won games to a competitive team that still doesn’t exactly have the respect of its more affluent rivals in the area, but clearly has a fire that comes directly from its coach. Manassas also has benefitted from the decision of three of the area’s most talented athletes to attend the school despite the fact the Tigers have never won a playoff game.
As Courtney preaches, “Football doesn’t build character, it reveals character,” something that guides “Undefeated” away from scrutinizing the Tigers’ offensive schemes or even spending time with its quarterback in favor of the stories of what have to be its three most interesting players: Brown, the aforementioned right tackle whose playing days will end with high school since he’s too small for a college program and has worked hard both on the field and off to still get accepted somewhere; Chavis Daniels, a junior who didn’t play his sophomore year since he was in a youth detention facility as a result of his serious anger issues; and O.C. Brown, a ridiculous physical specimen at left tackle who has the best chance at a post-high school playing career if only he could pass his college entrance exam.
With just an hour-and-a-half, Lindsay and Martin, who last directed “Last Cup: Road to the World Series of Beer Pong,” follow a traditional game-by-game chronicle of the season, which contrary to its title begins with a loss and heightens the stakes on every game after, and the time crunch doesn’t really allow for as rich a portrait of its subjects and their community as something like “Hoop Dreams,” but may be nearly as rewarding.
Lindsay and Martin shot over 500 hours of footage in the course of the year and it’s obvious they understand the amount of set-up required to make a
