Garlic_Shred

Well, I really don't know where to start. Borrowing the title of a classic horse story to make a film that would make Twilight look subtle is basically what happened here.

You've got the 'Different', 'Outcast' girl as the main character, even though she looks about thirty and would be one of the most attractive girls in any school around the world. You've got the overprotective dad, the attractive, mysterious boy, the one-dimensional spiteful and snooty villain.

Topped off with all the generic pop romance music and this hits all the marks needed to create the ultimate middle-class pre-teen girls' film.

The only reason I kept watching was to see just how bad it could get and in the end it was definitely one of the worst I've seen, but just wasn't self aware or ridiculous enough to be so bad that it's good. It's just the sheer definition of mediocrity really and a bit of a laborious experience with a few unintended laughs here and there.

I would say that the end was OK because I was genuinely expecting the typical 'good guys win yay!' ending, but it just felt really anticlimactic; it had so much build up and ended in about ten seconds. So that gained no positives.

All in all, it's complete garbage, not memorable, but not forgettable. Just a nothing film.

This film really gave me the impression that the creators really didn't know that much about athletics and just made this purely to cash in on the UK's Olympic hype.

Fist of all it's implied that the main character is relatively unknown in athletics and springs out of nowhere to become part of the team GB World Championship athletics team. Yeah, that's not really how it works, if she was already getting times that were good enough to be in the running for a team GB place, people would have known about her. She would already have competed in many national competitions and made a name for herself before qualifying for Great Britain.

Also the fact that they go on a night out and drink alcohol literally the night before an international competition doesn't make much sense. If that was how the GB team operated in real life, I'd be very worried, therefore it's obviously just a plot device put in place to create conflict failing to reflect any sort of reality.

However those are just little gripes. What really brought this film down was the clichéd plot points. We've got the arguments in the team which threaten to stop them winning, the forced romance which breaks down due to a misunderstanding and character arcs like the main character not working well in teams and the rich girl whose father does away with her if she doesn't win. These have all been done before, are executed poorly in this film and lack any depth as we know full well what will happen the moment we see them.

They could have included an interesting plot point which connects to athletics, such as the main character being offered performance enhancing drugs or maybe delving deeper into how the main character got into running. But no, you could pretty much put this film's storyline into any sports movie and it would still work. Well, I say work, what I mean is produce the same forced and bland garbage that these kind of films have developed into over the years.

All in all, the characters have no chemistry, the film is detached from reality and the plot points are very predictable.

Do I really need to tell you what happens in the end? Didn't think so.