I wish many good things for John Cena, but as far as his mainstream film career goes, I was thinking more buddy comedies, less overly-serious-family-and-local-sports dramas with Patricia Clarkson and Danny Glover:
More broadly, I think this movie reflects an unfortunate trend in sports movies, where every final contest has to be a matter of life and death, or at least major societal change. For a while it was segregation that had to be felled, with Secretariat, it’s going to be sexism, and Legendary appears to be another entry in the cult of self-esteem. I think it’s fine to make movies about individual achievement and the beauty and psychology of a game, in fact, I think more sports movies should have that kind of tight-bore focus — a movie about Sandy Koufax doesn’t have to be about all Jews in America, and the struggle between Billy Martin and Reggie Jackson doesn’t have to be about black men in baseball or New York’s struggle to revive itself because there’s enough psychological richness in the men and their achievements themselves. But I don’t think those individual stories of growth and accomplishment need to be elevated to the status of legend to be interesting. These feats are more compelling if men make them happen, not gods. But winning a damn wrestling match doesn’t actually make a scrawny kid a deity, either.