Chasing Great: Is The New Richie McCaw Movie Any Good?

Calum Henderson reports from the world premiere of a new feature-length documentary about the mythical All Blacks great.

Watching the All Blacks pull apart first Wales then the Wallabies in their trademark clinical fashion this year, something hasn’t felt quite right. When the bus stop billboards started going up for the autobiographical Richie McCaw documentary Chasing Great a couple of weeks ago I finally realised what it was: I missed Richie.

For the majority of his playing career I kind of rolled my eyes at Richie McCaw. The intense public adulation, all those painful television ad appearances, the fact that he was from Canterbury. Only once he retired at the end of the successful 2015 World Cup campaign did I fully come around to what the rest of the country, and most of the rugby world, has been feeling for the last ten years.

Even with my newfound love of this humble Kiwi hero, I was skeptical at the prospect of a full-length feature documentary about him. Addressing the 2,400-strong crowd before the world premiere in Auckland’s Civic Theatre on Tuesday night, the man himself admitted having similar doubts. Aside from being probably the greatest All Black of all time, off the field he is also quite possibly the world’s most uninteresting man.

Chasing Great doesn’t do much to change that perception – in fact filmmakers Justin Pemberton and Michelle Walshe seem to have embraced it. They were granted unprecedented access to the “extraordinarily ordinary” McCaw and to the All Blacks team environment during the 2015 World Cup campaign. His interviews, while charming and earnest throughout, never really reveal much.

Nevertheless, the film is well-crafted and paced, playing out more or less like a big-screen version of the classic rugby autobiography Kiwis buy their dads for Christmas – the kind he devours in one sitting on Boxing Day.

The early scenes employ home video footage and the odd reenactment to chart the rise of young McCaw from a stocky farm boy with a pet lamb to a determined schoolboy flanker scouted by then Canterbury selector Steve Hansen. The home video is some of the film’s best material – it’s worth the price of admission just to see 21-year-old Richard McCaw hear his name being read out in the All Blacks squad for the first time on 2001.

McCaw’s All Blacks career is measured in World Cups. The disaster in 2007 – his first as captain – is a pivotal moment, one which forced him to reassess his approach to the game and start building the rugby robot McCaw we know and love, one fuelled by motivational quotes and fine-tuned by sports psychologists.

The real hero of the film could be Ceri Evans, the psychologist who came on board with the All Blacks in 2010 and helped them conquer their World Cup hoodoo in 2011. His interviews are enlightening and provide some much-needed depth and context to the outstanding cinematic match footage.

Seeing the game through a theatrical lens casts it in a whole new light – the match-day scenes shot in 2015 in particular are spectacular. You almost wish they’d foregone the interviews altogether and instead made rugby version of Zidane, the experimental film where cameras fixed on the French football star for the duration of a football match.

Chasing Great is a riveting watch, though one which never reveals too much about its subject beyond the predictable themes of hard work and determination. Like the rip-roaring sports autobiographies it evokes, it does more to solidify than to deconstruct the mythical Richie McCaw. As a recently converted Richie fanatic, I lapped up every second of it.

7/10