'We Are Marshall'

From the ashes, we rose," whispers the earnest narrator of this, the World Trade Center of college-football soapers. Based on the true story of the all-frosh season that followed a West Virginia team's 1970 plane crash, We Are Marshall gets the McG treatment. Tugging the film into post–9-11 allegory, the flashmaster who brought us both Charlie's Angels flicks squanders his primo period setting in favor of this-really-happened clichés involving the eager-beaver new coach (Matthew McConaughey), cautious college prez (David Strathairn), grieving girlfriend (Kate Mara), field goal kicker brilliantly plucked from the soccer squad, etc. Vietnam, campus unrest, and racial tension merit not a single acknowledgement in a heal-your-heart movie that even overdubs Coach's sacrilegious "damn" with a "darn" to complete the scrubbing. Even by the low standards of the young-jocks-as-good-clean-soldiers movie, there's little at stake here, unless you count the kids' hunger to win one for the Gipper.