The Junction Boys

The Junction Boys (2002)

Victory is the prize, Pain is the price.

Tom Berenger leads an outstanding cast in this bone-crunching dramatization of legendary college football coach Paul "Bear" Bryant's debut at Texas A&M in the summer of 1954. The often unnerving story finds Bryant ducking the school's good ol' boy network of rich, influential alumni by spiriting his new team away to a makeshift training base in a tiny town called Junction. There, Bryant runs the equivalent of a POW camp, brutalizing an oversized, underdeveloped bunch of rowdy young men and tormenting those who seek medical attention for cracked spines and deadly heat exhaustion. Berenger delivers a warts-and-all performance as the vulgar, monstrous, yet much-respected Bryant, and the direction by seasoned television vet Mike Robe is brisk and almost explosively charged. Whatever one thinks of Bryant's punishing methods, the film does not flinch from telling its powerful tale. --Tom Keogh

Date of release
2002-12-14
TMDB
6.5 / 10 (16)
Runtime
1h 33m
Genres
Drama, TV Movie
Director
Mike Robe

Casting

Interesting facts

The Junction Boys is a 2002 American sports drama television film written and directed by Mike Robe, based on sportswriter Jim Dent's 2001 book. It is about the Junction Boys, the "survivors" of Texas A&M Aggies football coach Paul "Bear" Bryant's brutal 10-day summer camp in Junction, Texas, beginning September 1, 1954. The film stars Tom Berenger as Bryant. It aired on ESPN on December 14, 2002.

Production

Filming took place in Sydney, Australia, for budgetary reasons. Except for the American Berenger, the cast members were Australian, and were coached by a Texas-born dialect coach to use correct Texan accents. To bypass the differences between American and Australian rules football, the filmmakers recruited players from American football clubs in Australia for the football scenes.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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