When I first saw the sports documentary Murderball in 2005, I thought for sure moviegoers would call it one of the best films of the year. (I did.)
Mainly shot on now-discontinued, digital video camcorders, this film shined a light on wheelchair rugby (originally named “murderball” when it was developed in — wait for it — quaint ol’ Canada), an extreme sport played in a dozen countries by quadriplegics with varying degrees of muscle strength.
The souped-up wheelchairs they use for these games are straight outta Mad Max: rebuilt, metal-and-aluminum doom machines that make the players look like they’re riding on top of Battlebots. They strap themselves in, slap sticky stuff on their gloves and prepare for a game that usually has players getting in some wild collisions.
Murderball created a promising amount of buzz at Sundance earlier that year, where it won the Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature. THINKFilm, the movie’s distributor, even roped in cable channels A&E and MTV (which dropped a Jackass Meets Murderball special) to help promote the film and get it in theaters.
The critics loved it. Entertainment Weekly raved about breakout star Mark Zupan, Team USA player and one of Murderball’s main figures, even calling him “this summer’s surprise action hero” on the cover. Eventually, it was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 2006 Academy Awards, where it lost to more conventionally cheery audience favorite March of the Penguins.
Despite all the raves, awards, and heavy promotional backing, though, the $350,000 film only grossed $1.8 million. (THINKFilm was hoping for $10-12 million.) In the 20 years since its release, Murderball has become one of the forgotten gems of 21st-century cinema’s first quarter. (It certainly wasn’t on that ballyhooed, 100-best-films-of-the-century list The New York Times dropped a while ago.) Where audiences back then dismissed it, today’s streaming, binge-watching crowd most likely never heard of it.
The distributors didn’t expect able-bodied moviegoers to stay away in droves. “People seem resistant to seeing a film about so-called disabled people because they think they’ll feel bad,” THINKFilm president Jeff Sackman told The Globe and Mail a year later. “Well, guess what? If they saw it, they’d feel great.”
I second that. A fresh, funny, life-affirming energy drink of a movie, Murderball dares to do something that movies, both fiction and non-fiction, rarely want to touch: It shows people in wheelchairs being dicks.
Directors Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro (who wrote the 2002 Maxim article on wheelchair rugby that set off the production) present the paralyzed players of Murderball as crude, crusty warriors who can be bullying and loutish both on-and-off the court. They don’t want your pity, because they’re sure as hell ain’t gonna give you theirs.
The chief a-holes are Zupan, whose own friends say was a grump long before he was physically damaged in a drunk-driving accident; and the Enrico Colantoni-looking Joe Soares, a victim of childhood polio who’s an ex-Team USA vet. In the film, he’s the abrasive head coach for Team Canada, ducking Benedict Arnold comparisons from his stateside colleagues as he works on one goal: taking down the team that once cut him. Both men occasionally butt heads during games, as USA and Canada are locked in a heated rivalry that leads up to the 2004 Paralympics in Athens.
Murderball mostly spends time with Team USA, whose undefeated, cocky swagger brings out the haterade from rival, international teams. (I love how even this team exudes the same obnoxious, we-the-best patriotism that ran rampant during the Bush II era and continues to the day.) In-between the frenetically-shot game scenes, we get to know more about the players.
Rubin and Shapiro revel in showing these guys as, well, guys. They get shitfaced and roughhouse in a hotel lobby. They play a prank on a girl that involves stuffing one of their quadriplegic players in a box. And don’t get it twisted about the sex! Murderball confirms that these men still have enough working parts to literally roll up on any lady and get their attention. They also don’t mind using their disability to their advantage. As one player (or should I say playa) admits, “The more pitiful I am, the more women like me.”
The directors also catch these guys when they’re at their least valiant. Zupan has a hard time reconnecting with the guilt-ridden friend who caused the accident, while Soares can’t seem to find the time to connect with his violin-playing son. And for those wondering how these men got back to living again, we follow the journey of Keith, a former motocross racer who’s in rehab, re-learning such simple acts as taking off his shoes.
Murderball doesn’t shy away from revealing the personal and physical hardships these men go through on the daily, but it doesn’t dwell on them either. For Rubin and Shapiro, it’s about getting the flaws and all. It’s about capturing how these bullheaded quadriplegics can be as stubborn and prickly (and prickish) as people who can walk — and they would like people to keep that in mind whenever they meet one.
I have a theory that a lot of people stayed away from Murderball not because they didn’t want to feel sorry for these players. They stayed away because they didn’t want to feel sorry for themselves. Although most people these days choose to act invalid, mostly staying at home and using their limbs to play video games or order Uber Eats, these strong-armed, top-heavy sons-a-bitches work every day to go out and live their best life. Just sitting around being all woe-is-me is never an option. In one scene, Zupan visits Keith’s rehab center and gives the patients a presentation on the sport, giving these folks an athletic, productive alternative to shutting themselves out from the world. (The minute Keith sees Zupan’s tricked-out chair, he’s immediately hooked.)
Murderball features men who once thought their lives were over playing sports, traveling around the world, driving cars, having families, getting laid, etc. What the hell have you done lately?
Craig D. Lindsey is a Houston-based writer. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @unclecrizzle.
