Well, it clearly looks like I have found the gold mine of 2022. Director Craig Roberts helped me find it with his new film “The Phantom of the Open”. The rowdy and big-hearted film from him makes it a worthy contender for the best film of 2022 so far and it shows that I actually admired Mark Rylance in a movie two times this year.
Oscar-winner Mark Rylance plays the infamous late British golfer Maurice Flitcroft. Flitcroft is known to be one of the world’s worst golfers and to break many of the biggest records when it comes to horrible golf playing. Maurice, when watching a golf broadcast on television, gets inspired to develop a golf career and ends up competing in the British Open. The only problem he has in his hands is that he has no experience playing golf. In a handful of hilarious scenes, when he starts to practice his golf skills, he accidentally swings the ball at several people and knocks them on their heads.
Sports films are the ones I usually avoid because of their corny cliché tropes they tend to offer. That is the reason why my 20-year old self avoided both “Boogie” and “12 Mighty Orphans” last year. Not to be off-topic, but my current 22-year old self kind of wants to put “12 Mighty Orphans” on my radar. In the same year, I saw “Dream Horse” because it got a lot of praise. When I want to get motivated to watch a sports film, I have to look to see if it got positive reviews and I ended up seeing “The Phantom of the Open”, the movie I’m going to review today, because like “Dream Horse”, it got just that. It deserves it about 90%.
“The Phantom of the Open” is definitely one of the most entertaining and big-hearted sports movies I have seen since “King Richard”. I cannot believe such a mid-tier actor like Mark Rylance, who gave an excellent performance early this year in “The Outfit”, can deliver such a transformative and sympathetic role as Maurice Flitcroft. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are going to snub this bad boy unfortunately because they can’t handle nominating a performance that was either released in the summertime or distributed by Sony Pictures Classics like the film I am reviewing right now.
What I love about this film is that it allows the character’s mistakes in golf to be more of a heartfelt celebration rather than being a comical gimmick in the veins of Will Ferrell. The evidence in the film that proves what I am saying is that the sports commentators and publicists that watch Maurice’s horrendous golf playing sure want him out of the big leagues, but at the same time appreciate for how bad his golf playing is. It kind of recalls Florence Foster Jenkins, huh?
I always appreciate it when there are family aspects in sports movies. It shows throughout the movie that the Flitcroft family was into many fields of work including one of them who worked for Maurice’s golf career. For example, Craig Roberts incorporates Maurice’s two brothers’ conflict with their passion in disco dancing not going very successfully for them. It is definitely the film’s hugest heart. Not too many instances do you see a sports film with family aspects into it. Last year with Reinaldo Marcus Green’s “King Richard”, there was a huge meaning of family within the tennis sport. In “The Phantom of the Open”, Craig Roberts took this familiar recipe Green took with that movie and ran with it.
However, it can run through some live-action cartoon corniness in its first act like with usual sports movies.
That does not irritate the spectacle of what this film truly has to offer. If you are missing the classic sports film with the huge heart, “The Phantom of the Open” will remind you that the classic sports film is still in existence. It is by far the best film I have seen this year and this summer so far.
Grade: 9.5/10
