Watch Prefontaine For Free

Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Overrated and overhyped

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

I am goofy for any sports movie, so I don't tend to go out looking for one to watch, otherwise it is just not a special experience. After spending a whole day sleeping through the arduous process of not getting into a trial jury, I stumbled out into the streets of downtown Portland, Ore. only to stumble onto the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame. They were offering free ice cream and admission only $4. We were let out of jury duty early, so what the heck, I went for it.A sizable percentage of the hall of fame focuses on Steve Prefontaine and his achievements. I knew the name, but not the whole story. I found his story very compelling. A few hours and a few blocks later, I walked by the "Duck Shop" (Univ. of Oregon Ducks) which had the two Pre movies for sale. I have never had any interest in this store before, but now I knew I had to get my Pre movies.I watched this one (Prefontaine) first. It was surreal to ingest so much of Steve Prefontaine's life in one afternoon. I never did drugs of any kind, but the movie made me high on inspiration. I am a sports guy (aspiring 47 year old speed skater), so this movie had a lot of impact on me. I will soon share the experience with my bro-in-law who is a marathoner. I hope to snag him and others to go back with me to the little known Oregon Sports Hall of Fame to repeat the experience. We will follow that up with the two movies. I expect I personally will see the movie and visit the museum time and time again.This is a great movie. I would consider it a sports classic. I highly recommend it. Steve may not be too well known outside the running world and Oregon, but here in Oregon it is a different thing. So maybe you should come here awhile first before watching the movie. (I say that, not being a native). For sure, catch the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame in downtown Portland across from the courthouse and park. (Hey, I feel sorry for them, the clerk told me I was the 2nd guy to come in in two whole weeks! But I will go back not out of sympathy, but because it's a great way to learn sports history and get souped up for Prefontaine).BTW, my sports fav's are too numerous to mention, but off the top of my head... Shaolin Soccer, Chariots of Fire, For Love of the Game, every football game of the last 10 years (even though I really don't like football very much), the old B&W flick about the Harlem Globetrotters. I proudly add Prefontaine to my fav's list.As he is known to have said, "To give less than your best is to give away the gift" (posted outside the Hall of Fame).

Since he was young, Steve Prefontaine was always too short, too skinny or too slow to be the first choice for any sports – a thing that only made him work harder to become whatever he felt he needed to be and to make the most of any chance given to him. At age 16 he decides that he is not only to be a runner but that he will be representing his country in Munich at the 1972 Olympics. Training hard for the mile event, his coach at Oregon State, Bill Bowerman convinces him to focus on the three-mile and make the media interested in it. Keeping his goal of getting three seconds faster every year of university, Pre gets closer to his Munich date while his reputation as a cocky yet gutsy athlete grows.First of all, I, unlike many other thoughtless reviewers have put a spoiler warning on this review because I, like countless others, had never heard of Steve Prefontaine and therefore didn't know how the film would end; didn't know, that is, until the very plot outline on this site proclaimed it. Anyway, despite this I decided to watch it because it didn't strike me as the sort of film that knowing the end mattered (of course I would rather have been allowed to decide that for myself). From the start of the film a picture is painted of Preforntaine as a cocky but driven individual who worked to overcome anything that life threw in his way but was ultimately (and untimely) beaten by the obstacle that defeats us all. In telling this story the film tries to develop a character while also making sure it delivers the basic memorable moments in his career. As such it doesn't quite succeed but then I suppose it depends what the audience is; if you know all the milestones then it is likely that the film might bore as its focus is really on the "what happened" rather than the "who". However for a viewer like me who didn't know it then it does enough to be interesting. The docu-drama approach worked better than I expected it would and the film does have a good pace (sorry) to it and, because it made Prefontaine an interesting character it actually made for a quite emotional film.The cast work pretty well; certainly Leto's presence had me worried but he not only had a good resemblance but did well with the material he was given. His character is not a complex person, but then with biographical films it is always difficult to write such a character and usually it is more effective to condense them down to the essence of who they were. Ermey is good value here in one of only three films where he doesn't play some sort of sergeant-major (I'm joking but it feels like it could be true) and is a nicely grizzled character. Support from O'Neill, Meyer and others is OK but really the film belongs to the lead two and, although Leto is hardly the life of the film, his character's story is worth the watch.Overall this is a solid, if unspectacular film that may not win you over if you have a working knowledge of Prefontaine but, for me, it was interesting at the level that it was presented. An interesting story that told me what I needed to know – could have been better but did enough to work for me.

Prefontaine provides a deeply inaccurate portrayal of the life and skill of American track star Steve Prefontaine. The film creates a girlfriend whom he never had, and shows him as uneasy and unconfident about his ability. It makes claims of him having a poor kick to finish races, and yet this is not as large of an issue in actuality, while the issue of his body type not being that of a runners is true. The film is poorly scripted as well, doing a terrible job of capturing Bill Bowerman's personality. Bowerman was certainly eccentric, yet the film shows him in more of a lunatic or crazy form. Especially with the introduction of him by the mailbox scene. Another film created based on Prefontaine's life, Without Limits, truly and best finds the truth. The script and production were overlooked by Kenny Moore (writer), whom was a close personal friend of Prefontaine, and Mary Marx, Prefontaine's girlfriend, in the film Without Limits. The misinformation provided in Prefontaine extremely frustrates me because the least a biographical film can do is stick to the facts.

Prefontaine's life is what makes this movie watchable, not so much the movie itself. However, Jared Leto as Pre, and R. Lee Ermey and Ed O'Neill as Bill Bowerman and Bill Dellinger, respectively (Pre's coaches), offer good, convincing portraits of these historic sports figures. On the minus side, the sound track sounds like it belongs in a 70's made for TV movie, and the film's stadium scenes are unconvincing because the shots of fans are done close up to hide the obvious fact that there's only a hundred people or so in the stands and not the thousands that watched Pre race in reality. The producers should either have spent the money to pay for more actual footage of Pre's races, or paid for the extras to make the stadium scenes more convincing.