by Jake Hjort, Contributing Writer
Welcome back, fellow time travelers, to another edition of 20th Century Flicks! This month, in a continued effort to check classic cinema off of my list of shame, I’ve delved back to 1993 to watch Jon Turteltaub’s Cool Runnings. With the Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics taking place this month (and the Jamaican bobsledding team making yet another appearance), I figured this would be the perfect time to take a look at the cinematic telling of one of the best underdog, fish-out-of-water stories in sporting history.
Loosely based on a true story, Cool Runnings follows a group of Jamaican athletes with aspirations of Olympic glory. After failing to qualify for the 100m dash at the summer Olympics, sprinter Derice Bannock (Leon Robinson) finds a second chance to live out his Olympic dreams when he meets Irv Blitzer (John Candy), a disgraced gold medalist bobsledder who once believed in the potential of a bobsledding team from Jamaica and agrees to coach him. Derice recruits his best friend and pushcart driver Sanka (Doug E. Doug) along with fellow sprinters Junior (Rawle D. Lewis) and Yul Brenner (Malik Yoba). The four begin to learn to bobsled, despite living on an island that has never seen snow. Against all odds, the team is successfully able to learn the ropes and reach the qualifying time needed for the 1988 Olympic games in Calgary, where they face ire both from their fellow competitors as well as the sport’s governing body. Though they are able to build some unexpected momentum during their runs, their final attempt ends in disaster after a mechanical failure causes a crash, with the film ending as the four men carry their sled across the finish line.
I haven’t had the opportunity to talk about this much here on Siftpop, but I really do love sports movies. Sure, they’ve got the cliches and cookie cutter story beats, but sometimes you just want to put on a feel-good comfort movie, and, for that, nothing quite hits like a good sports flick. Watching an underdog face impossible odds to achieve their greatest dreams always warms my heart and makes me want to get up off the couch, hit the gym, and start working towards achieving my own. Cool Runnings maintains this feel-good, underdog sensation throughout the film, as we watch the Jamaicans combatting a lack of finances and resources, a lack of support from their community, and systemic racism in the bobsledding world on their path to the Olympics.
Of course, there’s something a bit extra special about an Olympics story as well. The pinnacle of athletic achievement, I feel that the idea of becoming an Olympian is something that every young athlete has yearned for at some point—I know that I certainly did when I ran track and fenced and I wasn’t even particularly good at either. To be able to live vicariously through others who fight to join this upper echelon of athletics is a special experience that I will always savor. Now, I’m not going to pretend that Cool Runnings is the greatest Olympics film of all time; as a Minnesotan I’d be publicly shamed for not giving Miracle the respect it deserves, and I’d probably rate others such as Chariots of Fire and Eddie the Eagle above it as well. That being said, Cool Runnings—and the Jamaican bobsledding team themselves—have a lot of charm and lasting cultural legacy that allows them to leave their mark on cinematic and Olympic history.
Of course, there’s more to being a film than just picking a good story to adapt. Cool Runnings is a ton of fun from start to finish, bringing a lot of energy and humor to the table to keep you engaged. Sanka provides much of the comedic relief throughout the film, a fish-out-of-water even amongst the rest of the Jamaican team, and I’ll admit that I laughed out loud a lot more than I was expecting. The films writers also do a good job keeping the story simple and contained to the 4 bobsledders and their coach, allowing for a clear understanding of everyone’s motivations and what drives them to defy the odds and push for success.
At the end of the day, Cool Runnings is a fun, heartwarming film that depicts the events of a fun, heartwarming real story. It can be difficult to separate the movie from the reality when writing reviews such as this, but I think that both the story and the filmmaking contribute to what makes this so memorable. I hope that everyone else has been enjoying the Milano-Cortina Olympic Games as much as I have, and best of luck to Jamaican Bobsledding team as they continue to defy the odds and compete year after year. “Feel the rhythm! Feel the rhyme! Get on up, it’s bobsled time!”
You can read more from Jake Hjort, and follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd