Save Your Legs!

Synopsis: Theodore ‘Teddy’ Brown (Stephen Curry) lives for cricket. Playing for a bottom tier suburban club, he seizes a chance to take the team on a tour to India. Culture clash shenanigans and sorely tested friendships ensue.

Based on a 2005 documentary (also directed by Hicklin), about the real life cricket team the Abbotsford Anglers, the principal device used to dramatize the originary material proves to be the man-child character. The man-child has been explored in cinema for some time now, most notoriously in the comedies of Adam Sandler  - the adult who refuses to let go of childhood and face up to the realities of their age, their position in the world, etc, etc. In theory it’s a good approach to take, as you’ve got a bunch of men leaving their freewheeling twenties behind them and facing up to realities like marriage and family, things that will take them away from weekend cricket as more demands are placed on their time. The thing is, to execute that idea requires a bit more than a few expository dialogue scenes and some boys behaving badly on the Indian sub-continent. Or at least, that’s how it seems to me.

I came away from this film not unhappy, but dissatisfied. Plot elements are set up but never paid off. The main one being a young pup pulled into the team as a ringer, who then betrays his mates and nothing more is ever said of the matter. Why then, even bother? There was scope for a simple payoff, but it’s like someone lost a page of the script during filming and nobody realized. But I suspect I’m expecting more from this film than it’s looking to deliver.

Save Your Legs! is a story of Aussie Mateship™, with good blokes being a bit silly but ultimately proving they love each other in between losing badly at games of cricket. I’m definitely not the audience for it, but I know a few people who might be. So if bogan humour and cricket are your things, give it a look. Otherwise, let it through to the keeper.

 

 

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