WITHOUT LIMITS (1998)

Like Oscar Wilde, Jean Harlow & Truman Capote, among others before him, Steve Prefontaine had the bad postmortem luck to have a pair of bio-pics released at nearly the same time and cancel each other out.  From Disney 1997, PREFONTAINE (D.O.A. - cost 8 mill against a half mill gross), and from 1998 this mid-budget Warners pic (D.O.A. - cost 25 mill against 3/4 mill gross).  Who was Steve Prefontaine, you ask?  Exactly.  (You now beat most film studio execs in perspicacity.)  Top amateur long-distance runner of the ‘70s, he died young & unfulfilled, but was an intriguing free-spirit with his own ideas on sport & life philosophy that butted up against his college coach.  An unknown Jared Leto played him in ‘97 (not seen here), and in ‘98 the better physically matched Billy Crudup.  Written & directed by Robert Towne, whose PERSONAL BEST/’82 has this film’s proper title, while no spent creative force, had definitely left his personal best on screen in the ‘70s.  Still, on paper, something of a catch to newbie producers Tom Cruise and past agent Paula Wagner, their second film, first without Cruise as star.  (Towne had previously worked on Cruise starrer THE FIRM/’93, a film best not revisited.)  And with Cruise & Wagner hot off the first MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE/’96, Warners eager to do business with them.  And the film?  Very Cruise, it feels written for him.  Very ‘80s in style.  Lenser Conrad L. Hall, with a mystique to equal Prefontaine, nifty during multi-plane racing compositions, less distinctive elsewhere.  On the debit side: grimly obvious soundtrack (brass fanfares, rock drumbeats); chemistry-free romance; little period flavor (not even at the 1972 Munich Olympics; attempts to integrate uplift & philosophy starved for oxygen.  All of it, the good and the bad, unable to hold focus against Donald Sutherland's brilliantly eccentric coach.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Why not the little seen PREFONTAINE?  From Steve James, fresh off HOOP DREAMS/’94 and making his first feature film.  Let us know what we’re missing in the Comments box.