Nothing kills a movie like a funeral.  Not always, of course.  The march to the cemetery in John Ford’s The Sun Shines Bright (1953) is a folkloric triumph.  The occasion in Abel Ferrara’s The Funeral (1996) serves as a rich background.  But a funeral that exists mostly to increase a bathos quotient can bring a movie to a sudden halt.  And movies are like sharks: If they stop moving, they die.

            That’s a lesson – the only lesson – to be drawn from The 5^th Quarter, a 2009 effort just now making its way to theaters.  The movie’s basis is a true story about the 2006 Wake Forest University football team, which upended all expectations to win its conference.  According to the movie, much of the credit goes to a player whose younger brother, a high schooler, died in a car crash and who dedicated the football season to his brother’s memory.  His teammates were thus inspired to perhaps play above their talents; the rest is collegiate sports history.

            The movie’s opening 25 minutes are given over to, first, establishing absolutely and beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the fatal car crash was not the hero’s brother’s fault, no way, uh-uh.  After that, Aidan Quinn, who plays the victim’s father, turns his considerable talents towards producing a hysterical, rafter-shaking depiction of grief.  If nothing else, it lends the movie a ot of energy.

            Then comes the funeral: Solemn remembrance, moist eyes, hierarchy (God’s will, etc.) reestablished.  It takes a while.  Writer-director Rick Bieber has trouble unifying space.  Emotion contracts.  Conflict vanishes.  The movie sinks like a sub.

            That’s about all there is to talk about.  The rest is all television on a movie screen.