Rule Breakers (Guttentag, 2025)

Rule Breakers is a tough film to criticize without sounding like a grinch or a jerk. Nevertheless…

The Afghan Girls Robotics Team or Afghan Dreamerz would, one thinks, be a group whose story writes itself. Maybe that is part of the problem. The film’s structure and story beats are indistinguishable from Rudy or Cool Runnings or Bend It Like Beckham or The Mighty Ducks, and while are heroines are indeed plucky underdogs, the genre feels slight when it comes to conveying the nature and extent of their obstacles.

A sports or competition narrative needs an antagonist, a symbolic embodiment of what the heroines are overcoming. Here, of course, the actual antagonist is the Taliban, the creators and rulers of a country that makes it nearly impossible for women to learn or for families to support and praise them when they do. But those obstacles feel invisible, more spoken about than seen. It is a film that does a lot of telling rather than showing. And even when it does show — such as a scene where a Dreamer is chastised by her father for signing a boy’s T-shirt at an international competition, the weight of consequences never quite feels real. The actors are professional and capable, but at no point did I suspend disbelief and feel as though I was watching characters rather than actors.

I was interested in Rule Breakers primarily because of the subject matter. Previous Angel Studio films that I had watched — Surprised by Oxford and The Sound of Freedom — had left me with the impression that it was a Christian film studio. But the film’s website presents “Christian” as one genre only, stating that its mission is “to inspire, uplift, and unite through meaningful storytelling.”

There is nothing wrong with uplift, but if one’s goal is to engender a particular emotion (or particular positive emotions) one tends to produce a lot of stories with little nuance, and it’s rare that the emotion lands as hard as it might if it were delivered with more complex storytelling.

I appreciate that Angel Films appears to be seeking and serving an audience a little broader than the white, anglo-saxon, protestant, American one that appears to have an endless appetite for obsequious faith-based films that only broadly resemble the world I live in. But I’m still waiting for that commitment to uplift to be matched by an equal commitment to artistic quality. Sometimes the truth is not uplifting, and sometimes I am uplifted by art that is truthful about the pain and ugliness people like the Dreamers have to overcome just to participate in events the rest of us might take for granted.

Rule Breakers will be playing in select theaters beginning March 6, 2025.