![]() So in stepped the younger Crudup, who at that point had done Sleepers, Inventing the Abbotts and … not much else. #MARY MARCKX PREFONTAINE MOVIE#However, the movie opens with Pre in high school, and by the late 90s, Cruise was a bit too old to pull off the role. A life that burns bright but short makes for good biopic fodder, which Towne and Tom Cruise - who collaborated on Days of Thunder, The Firm, and the first two Mission: Impossible movies - certainly recognized when they started planning a film version of Pre’s story. Though the Olympics didn’t quite go as planned, Pre had a bright career of more track-and-field heroics ahead of him when he died in a car wreck in 1975 at the age of 24. He became a nationwide sensation, appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated at age 19 and racking up an absurd number of American distance-running records on the way to competing at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany. RELATED: The 17 Best Sports Shows of the 21st Century, So Farįor those unaware, Prefontaine was an American long-distance runner who exploded onto the scene as a track star for the University of Oregon in the early 1970s. It also features two dynamite performances courtesy of Billy Crudup, who stars as Prefontaine in one of his earliest roles, and Donald Sutherland, coolly tweaking the “wizened mentor who could still learn a thing or two himself” trope as Bill Bowerman, Pre’s collegiate coach. But it’s also extremely light on its feet (which seems fitting for a movie about running), jettisoning a lot of the pomp and circumstance sports movies often employ for a smaller, more character-based narrative. Yes, it neatly employs a standard sports-biopic formula and utilizes some themes we’ve seen before in these kinds of films. #MARY MARCKX PREFONTAINE FULL#But with the 2020 Olympic Summer Games finally in full swing after a year-long delay thanks to COVID, it seems to be the ideal time to point out that Without Limits is, in fact, criminally underrated. It bombed at the box office, pulling in less than $1 million domestic, and though it was well-reviewed upon release, it has largely been lost to time, not evening meriting a plot breakdown on its Wikipedia page. What I’m trying to get at is there are a lot of ways for Without Limits to be overlooked, pushed aside, and just generally slept on. Heck, it could conceivably be your second favorite late 90s movie about Prefontaine. ( Chariots of Fire, for one, still looms large.) Without Limits doesn’t even necessarily have to be your favorite Towne movie about a real-life track star, as he also directed 1982’s Personal Best. Limit it strictly to movies about running, and it still may not top anyone’s "best of" list. Without Limits, Robert Towne’s 1998 biopic on long-distance running sensation Steve “Pre” Prefontaine, doesn’t usually get named as anyone’s favorite Olympics movie. ![]()
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