Cool Runnings (1993)
Directed by Jon Turteltaub
When a Jamaican sprinter is disqualified from the Olympic Games, he enlists the help of a dishonored coach to start the first Jamaican bobsled team.
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What critics compared Cool Runnings to
The Canadian cold has already inspired 1993's Cool Runnings, the warmly comic tale of the Jamaican bobsled team, and now it's produced Dexter Fletcher's Eddie the Eagle, a less than subtle biopic about the finest – that is, only – British ski jumper of his generation.
Not only did the Calgary Games produce the phenom of the Jamaican bobsled team — immortalized in the cheerful 1993 Disney movie “Cool Runnings” — but a bumbling bundle of fan catnip named Michael “Eddie” Edwards, the first British athlete to compete in the Olympic ski-jump competition, and an instant symbol of innocence, perseverance and irrepressible can-do-ism.
There’s a pat quality to all this that recalls lots of previous movies, including “Cool Runnings,” Jon Turteltaub’s surprise 1993 hit about the unlikely success of the Jamaican bobsled team in the same 1988 games.
The others were 1992’s The Cutting Edge and 1993’s Cool Runnings, both of which are about unlikely competitors achieving greatness (although The Cutting Edge was as much a romance as a sports movie).
Hell, this isn’t even the first movie about a plucky underdog at those Olympics; Calgary ’88 was the year that gave us Cool Runnings’ Jamaican bobsled team (who get a winking in-joke reference in Eddie).
Disney may be king of the underdog sports drama, but actor-turned-director Dexter Fletcher aims to beat the studio at its own game with this inspirational true story that’s equal parts “Rudy” and “Cool Runnings.”
Directed by Jon Turteltaub ( Cool Runnings , National Treasure ) and based on the first in a series of novels by Steve Alten, the premise is pure B-movie: a group of marine biologists accidentally allow a prehistoric giant shark to escape from the secret depths of the Mariana Trench and terrorize the ocean.
The lack of pizzazz is a little surprising: there isn't anything in the filmography of director Jon Turteltaub that would lead you to expect better, unless there are still fans of Cool Runnings out there, but even a veteran hack is under some obligation to move with the times.
Director Jon Turtletaub (director of 90s gems like Cool Runnings, While You Were Sleeping and the National Treasure franchise) heralds the return of shark attack movies, a genre made famous by Steven Spielberg’s Jaws way back in 1975, with The Meg , featuring our favourite square-jawed, heroic star Jason Statham.
Directed by Jon Turteltaub (Cool Runnings, While You Were Sleeping, and the National Treasure films), The Meg opens five years earlier, when Naval Captain Jonas Taylor (Statham), whose expertise is deep-sea diving and rescue, and his team are rescuing people from a submarine that appears (from the inside, at least) to be under attack from a giant…something.
Prior to the film’s release, director Jon Turtletaub ( National Treasure , Cool Runnings ) revealed a large smattering of gore was nixed from the final product in a bid to appeal to a wider audience (hence the rather tame M classification), and though copious amounts of blood and savagery don’t necessarily equate to a better movie, The Meg feels like the type of feature that would’ve benefited from a tighter restriction.
Director Jon Turteltaub (Cool Runnings, the National Treasure movies) has done the popcorn industry a serious service with this carnivorous charmer - bizarrely a pass-the-parcel project in Hollywood for the guts of two decades.
And its clear that director Jon Turteltaub (responsible for such film failures as Cool Runnings and Instinct ) brings only the films lamest elements to the table.
.Director Jon Turteltaub also made “Cool Runnings,” “While You Were Sleeping,” “Phenomenon” and “Disney's The Kid.”
"National Treasure," directed with zealous energy by Jon Turteltaub ("Phenomenon," "Cool Runnings"), is very smart at its core, even a little educational -- do you know the name of the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, or how Manhattan's central thoroughfare came to be called "Broadway"? -- but it wears the clothes of an absurd Jerry Bruckheimer production.
In the end, it’s the odd casting and unimaginative, workmanlike direction (from the man behind both the Anthony Hopkins potboiler Instinct and Disney’s Jamaican bobsled epic Cool Runnings) that make the painfully overlong National Treasure the exercise in mediocrity it is.