Take Down

I don’t think my school had a wrestling team the entire time I was a student there. I’ve read more books with high school wrestling in them than I’ve ever known high school wrestlers. That said, my friends were more the kind of people who, if they went out for sports, were on teams where no one really cares. I knew people on the football team, but most of my friends were on the tennis team or the girls’ volleyball team or the swim team. Contact sports were not really our thing.

Ed Branish (Edward Herrmann) seems like he would’ve been one of us. He’s stuck teaching high school in Mingo Junction (American Fork, Utah), and he hates it. He considers himself too smart for the locals. He’s teaching remedial English to kids who he believes can barely speak the language, much less pass the class. Meanwhile, the school’s football team loses again to their rival school, against whom they have lost every sports match for seven years. The boys agree to form a wrestling team. And Branish is stuck coaching it.

Oh, we’re not done with plot yet. Jill Branish (Kathleen Lloyd) wants to start a family and doesn’t want to wait until “next year, when he’s at Harvard.” Nick Kilvitus (Lorenzo Lamas) is failing English and doesn’t think he’ll be able to graduate because he’s doing his drunken father’s job for him and spending all night keeping him out of bars. Brooke Cooper (Maureen McCormick) has a thing for Nick. Her brother, Bobby (Vincent Roberts), turns out to be dying, which is dropped on us out of nowhere and we never find out what of. Several of the other wrestlers have plots, but I lost track.

If I had made this movie, I would have trimmed it of everything but the conflict between Branish and Nick. Yes, the wrestling, and, yes, the background about Nick’s dad. However, we don’t need the Fat Band Kid, Randy Jensen (Stephen Furst), who gets roped into wrestling because they need a guy of a certain weight class. The plot with Chauncey Washington (Toney Smith) as a natural athlete who doesn’t want to wrestle never goes anywhere, and we certainly didn’t need the lengthy bit about how he had to lose a couple of ounces and was trying to do so . . . in the bathroom.

Or maybe that plot was about Jasper Magruder (Kevin Hooks). This isn’t “the two black kids look alike.” This is “at least I can tell the black kids apart from all the other kids.” One of the kids used to wrestle in Pennsylvania before moving to the school, but I don’t know which kid that was. One of the kids wrestles better if a specific song is playing—leading to an actual “ain’t no rule” moment—but I have no idea why or who he was. Hell, the two plots about a black kid may have been about two separate black kids, and the movie doesn’t develop anyone nearly well enough.

No, not even Nick. He’s a poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks who’s in love with a rich girl but has to do his father’s job for him. (Which I have other problems with.) He’s not going to graduate no matter what happens, it turns out, but Branish is bribing him with graduation to be on the team, at least at first. And that’s it. That’s what we know about Nick. What does he want to do with his life? I have no idea. The movie doesn’t seem to care. I don’t even know why he cares so much about graduating, other than it is generally a positive thing to graduate from high school.

It’s even worse during the matches; I can’t tell which kid is wrestling, because they aren’t clear enough. However, I think the kids spend most of the movie not having uniforms. They’re wearing wrestling clothes, but most of it, they don’t seem to look alike. And sometimes the outfits of the other team look enough like theirs for me to not even be sure who’s on which team. There is no suspense, and there is no way to follow the plot.

Mostly, I came away from this movie horrified at high school wrestling in general. That a matter of ounces, on someone who’s already lost multiple pounds to be in a specific weight range in the first place, is a big deal makes me uncomfortable. Later, a character has to lose even more than that in perhaps an hour or two. It’s not healthy. Starving teenagers to get them below a certain weight can damage their health and relationship with food for the rest of their lives. And that’s even without getting into shoving their crotches into one another’s faces.

The Wikipedia page for this movie calls Branish a snob, but I wonder how much he’s one of us inasmuch as he retreated into being smarter than everyone else in a place with a lot of jocks. It’s clear he never had interest in athletics before, and in some places, a certain snobbishness about intelligence is a shield against how you get treated for that. If he’s smart enough to assume he’s going to be at Harvard the next year, it makes a certain sense he’s forgotten how to deal with people of average intelligence, much less ones without an interest in academics at all.

This was Disney’s first PG movie. Everyone wants you to know that. I’m not sure why it was. I might’ve heard an f-bomb in there somewhere, but that’s about it. Maybe the wrestling. Maybe the implied sex between the Branishes at one point. I have no idea. Usually, I feel as though the ratings in my generation were much looser than they are today, but if I’m wrong about that single solitary swear, I don’t see what in this wasn’t for all audiences unless it was the song written and performed by Lorenzo Lamas.