Murderball
***
Directed by Henry Alex Rubin
and Dana Shapiro
Starring Mark Zupan and Joe Soares
Classification: NA
This Sundance 2005 Audience Award-winning documentary is about quadriplegic athletes who play murderball, a.k.a. "quad rugby," a sport that looks like a futuristic combination of football and demolition derby. The four players on each team ram each other, knock each other down, and gloat when they send a rival sprawling on the gymnasium floor.
The film also flattens a few stereotypes by showing athletes in wheelchairs who come across, not as vulnerable, but brash, aggressive and macho.
Reportedly, after seeing the film, rapper Eminen is anxious to play a wheelchair athlete in a coming movie.
Dana Shapiro, one of the co-directors of this entertaining jock-umentary, originally financed his trip to the 2002 quad rugby world championships in Sweden by writing an article for Maxim magazine, which indicates the extreme-sport angle of the doc. The pumped-up, fast-edited MTV style emphasizes attitude, sex and raw language, and a dramatic rivalry between two larger-than-life characters.
Murderball starts with the 2002 world championships, where the 11-time world champ Americans were upset by the Canadian team. This becomes a jumping off point for the back-stories of Canadian coach Joe Soares and the cocky American captain Mark Zupan.
Soares, who was dumped by the U.S. team when he slowed down because of age, took over the Canadian team to achieve his revenge. The Canadian coach, who has been in a chair since he had polio as a child, is a hyper Type-A personality. He is married with a 12-year-old son who's bookish, plays the viola and is physically unco-ordinated. Scenes showing Soares's exasperation with his son's apparent shortcomings are some of the most excruciating moments in the documentary, though Joe's attitude improves after he has a heart attack.
On the other side, Zupan is an intimidating figure with a goatee and tattoos. Friends at a high-school reunion say Zupan was just as arrogant before his accident. One night, the 18-year-old Zupan passed out drunk in the back of a pickup truck. A drunken friend ran the truck into a guardrail, flipping Zupan into a canal, where he spent 14 hours with a broken neck, hanging on a tree branch. The growing reconciliation between the two men is another subplot of the drama.
As well as offering smaller profiles of different players, capturing their trash-talking, prank-playing style, the film takes a detour to cover the case of Keith Cavill. Cavill broke his neck while racing his motorcycle. When Zupan visits the rehabilitation hospital to talk about wheelchair rugby, Cavill has an on-camera epiphany: As he sits in Zupan's modified road-warrior chair, he can barely contain his excitement.
If there's one impediment to completely enjoying Murderball, it's the way the film's inspirational message gets polluted with patriotism. The American bias is so prevalent we never learn the name of a single player from the Canadian team (though the film's producers, ThinkFilm, are Canadian).
There's a scene where the American team demonstrates wheelchair rugby to soldiers crippled in the war in Iraq, and later, Zupan appears on the same podium as U.S. President George W. Bush. These scenes, presumably intended to be uplifting, have exactly the opposite effect.
