Sick Product of a Sick System

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

Blistering performances.

Let me start by stating the obvious. Yes this is a television movie (but one of the small percentage that are actually of a decent quality), and yes this is a sports movie. So with that established one would know the territory they are in very early, and what to expect along the way. However he we get all of the above but delivered with a nice reined quality by all concerned. The script and direction are good and so are the performances. The film is bases around the events leading up to Roger Bannister becoming the first man to run a sun four minute mile, and to this extent you are invested in the movie and genuinely wish him to succeed. I know an artistic liberty where taken with certain characters, but that really is for athletics historians to quibble about. Jamie Maclachan is very good as the reserved Englishmen Roger Bannister who is continuously struggling to find the right balance between his medical studies at Oxford and his athletics. There is good support leading to the inevitable yet still enjoyable conclusion. Would I watch it again? Yes but not regularly and only if I find it on television.

I'm actually quite fond of sport movies and have a weak spot for it, no matter how formulaic they all are. Lots of them are the same, even though they concentrate on totally different sports. This movie is also like that but with as a difference that it also features some very sloppy and simplistic storytelling, which makes the movie seems like a totally unoriginal and uninspiring movie.The movie actually does have an original sports story, after all it's about the man who was the first to run the mile under the 4 minute mark and he developed some new training techniques to achieve this but yet the movie and its story do not work out very original because the movie decides more to feature all kinds of different less interesting sidetracks, such as on Bannister's love life. It basically features all of the clichés from the book, which causes this movie to not work out as the most original or inspiring one the genre has to offer.Not that it is an horrible movie, it still is a maintaining one but it also feels like a waste of such a fine and original sports story. After all, it's all based on real events and real life persons.The story also doesn't flow very well and feels quite sloppy at times. This is mostly due to the fact that the movie tries to tell too much in a too short amount of time. The movie is only like 95 minutes short but yet it tries to put Bannister's whole athletics career into the movie. This also causes the movie its story to progress in an highly unlikely movie. I mean, just because he ran well once during a school event he's being labeled as a great talent and shortly after it he already runs the Olympics. Like I said, it all happens too fast and sudden because of it that the story tries to tell and achieve too much in a too limited time span. It causes the movie to make some big leaps at times and because of this it partly fails to bring over the story of Bannister's groundbreaking achievement in the '50's.Further more it's obvious that the movie didn't had a big budget to spend. It's a made for TV movie, which means that the movie features some simple film-making. Nothing is out of the extraordinary and at times the movie decides not to show any of the races (such as the Olympic run), which obviously got done because of budgeting reasons and because it was virtually impossible for this movie with its limited resources to recreate an Olympics event from the past.The acting is quite good, though Jamie Maclachlan isn't the most charismatic actor. My guess is that he got picked because he looked like the real Roger Bannister, rather than that he got picked for having the best acting skills. But it needs to be said that the movie doesn't handle his character always well. For instance, in the beginning he is still a shy young man, who blushes when a girl even looks at him but later on he's a real player who uses cheesy lines and actions to get the girl he likes. And by the way, his looks also don't exactly makes it very likely that these type of girls as shown in the movie would ever fall for such a man like Bannister. Just one of the silly and unlikely aspects of this movie.The movie does get better though when it heads towards its ending, to its inevitable world record attempt. But here also lies a problem, you already know in advance that he is going to achieve to run under the 4 minutes mark. So despite the film-makers good efforts, the last run doesn't really work out that exciting and the tension that gets build up seems completely redundant.It's not a movie that I hated watching, it certainly is maintaining enough but as a sports movie it simply is not original or inspiring enough.6/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

Obviously, this is a sports movie so its going to be predictable. I really enjoyed this movie because the individual aspect of track and field makes it extremely hard to make an effective movie about it.Roger Bannister's breaking four minutes for the first time is probably the single greatest event in track history. It was a huge mental barrier which stood for nearly 20 years as something man couldn't break. Al though this movie didn't perhaps focus on that as much as it could, it still got that point across well. It was also very good at showing the world of sport back then - very white, gentile, amateur and elite, especially in Britain. And Roger Bannister was someone who personified all of it. That was shown well in Four Minutes, with him struggling to choose between medicine and running. The only real discrepancy I noticed was that they changed who was coaching him (it was in reality Franz Stampfl, an Austrian).Overall, this was a well-done movie which really covered all the bases in terms of the story of Roger Bannister. It showed who he was, what he was up against, and how he pulled it off.

This TV made for movie was obviously made to commemorate Roger Bannisters achievement in being the first athlete to run the mile in under 4 minutes. In fact it was made in in 2004 but I just saw it last week in the USA on of all things a sports cable channel.ESPN sports network is designed for the sports fan with attention deficit disorder with its quick fire sports updates of every baseball , hockey game, and college football match in about two minutes. When the pundits are not barking at each other or deliberately disagreeing with one another just for the sake of it, the shaky camera work and the high pitch wise cracking rhyming commentary leaves someone with an average IQ head spinning. It's all over the place which is part and parcel of the American jive on cable news and sports TV and which is the way American advertisers want it I suppose. I tell you it makes sky sports update on for half an hour look slow and pedestrian by contrast, unfortunately, it also sums up "Four Minutes" as a movie.As for the movie itself I really have to wonder why they bothered to make this film there was nothing interesting about it. Not only was it slow it seemed pointless when you knew what the outcome was.What made this movie worse was that Bannister was not a likable or an interesting character as far as this movie portrayed and after a while I couldn't care less if he ran under 4 minutes or not! However this is only part of the problem. It dawned on me why make a movie about an athlete that never achieved anything else meaningful in athletics before or after this? He retired from competitive athletics to pursue medicine and his record did not last long because very shortly it was broken by another runner. It would have been more interesting if he had smashed the record while running from the front or else had held it for a few years. It's not just by today standards he would still be on the back straight while the current crop of runners were running through the finishing line, it's that when you stack it up against Seb Coe's 800 meter run in 1981 or Michael Johnson smashing the world 200 meter record in 1996 and Bob Beamons jump in 1968 what he achieved was insignificant by comparison. Yes the four minute barrier being broken was a mile stone (excuse the pun) but when you line them up against the back drop of Olympic and world records Bannisters athletic achievements are minuscule by comparison. Coe's record lasted 16 years, Beamons 25 years and who knows when Johnsons is going to be beaten. In addition Coe, Beamons and Ed Moses best times/distance would still be very competitive today 25-35 years on. Today there are so many runners who can run under four minutes that you could pick any race i.e. a southern English counties one mile race sponsored by the AAA at Crystal palace, Bannister would canter in all spaghetti legged an exhausted last!The only positive thing I would say was that the period costumes of the 1950's did look good, the dull gray conditions of that day were realistic and the pace making of Chataway and Brasher was portrayed well. As I said at the beginning I wished this movie had been four minutes ---- the last four minutes only — other than that I'm afraid I can't recommend this too much!.