Cool Runnings (1993) features most of the uplifting-sports-movie clichés you can think of. Victory built from one-time personal ruin. Multiple cheerily soundtracked training montages sprinkled with a healthy number of blunder-born laughs. A stern father character who climactically gets a this-is-your-dream-not-mine talking-to. A slow-clap from a crowd after our main cast of characters has publicly triumphed over an obstacle that had only a few moments before seemed cataclysmic.

One of the things that gives this ultimately charming movie some much-needed novelty is the peculiarity of its based-on-fact premise. It’s about a quartet of young Jamaican men (Leon Robinson, Doug E. Doug, Malik Yoba, and Rawle D. Lewis) that form the first team to represent the country in the Winter Olympics’ bobsleigh competition. Coincidence brings about their connection to this sport that, it goes without saying, isn’t much thought about under the Jamaican sun. The Robinson character, Derice, is a teacher, but he’s much more passionate about running, which he can be found doing around the island at most hours of the day in preparation for the upcoming Summer Olympics in Seoul. (The movie begins at the end of 1987 and spreads the rest of its narrative out over the next year or so.) 

Once he finally gets to the trials, Derice seems, for the first few seconds of the race, like he’s going to at last realize his certainty that he’s “going to win the gold.” But the nice guy on Derice’s left who wishes him luck, Junior (Lewis), trips a few steps in, and in his stumbling he brings both Derice and another guy, the burly, tough-guy-posturing Yul (Yoba), down. The unfair race isn’t rescheduled, despite Derice’s pleas. He’s matter-of-factly told that he’ll have to wait another four years for his next shot. Derice might love running, but it’s clear that he’s just as, if not more, simply enamored of the idea of going to the Olympics and proving to the world, not just his small community that looks at his athletic determination affectionately, that he’s great. 

Leon Robinson, Rawle D. Lewis, Malik Yoba, and Doug E. Doug in Cool Runnings.

Robinson has the right physicality for the role. His posture is stick-straight; you don’t detect an ounce of fat on a body that’s very rarely at rest. That turns out to be the part’s most important asset: the infectiously and aspirationally confident way Derice carries himself is mostly what gets the team off the ground, and once that team is up and moving you notice how much his character falls to the narrative’s periphery. He seems the best-adjusted and most grounded, despite what comes close to outright cockiness; he doesn’t have much to offer outside of being a kind of conduit in Lynn Siefert, Tommy Swerdlow, and Michael Goldberg’s screenplay.

The other two guys in the doomed trails in which Derice competed are enlisted as other bobsleigh team members, and they offer a little more complexity to a cast of characters that otherwise don’t, much like their designated roles on the team, diverge that much from set stock types. Yul (Yoba) sees the Olympics as a way to get closer to America, a place where he’s sure he’ll find more fulfillment than in Jamaica but knows so little about outside of fantasy that he has no idea that the printed-out picture of his dream house he carries around as motivation — a still of Buckingham Palace — is in the U.K., not garden-variety real estate stateside. Junior, who comes from money, is so dominated by his wealthy-businessman father (Charles Hyatt) that he’s been swallowed by his own passivity. He’s so used to being told what to do that, even in adulthood, he doesn’t feel like he can advocate for himself when he thinks a decision his dad has made for him is wrong.

Yul and Junior, by design, will grow a lot in the course of the movie. Yul learns to shed his protective wall of toughness, and Junior works up the courage to stand up for himself because of the new purpose their recently taken-on sport has given them. (Junior doesn’t dream about training for and competing in bobsleigh competitions, but being on this team is useful as a means to be his own person.) Yoba’s and Lewis’ very good performances add needed shade to their familiar arcs; the same goes for John Candy, in a mostly serious turn as the team’s hesitant coach (he’s a disgraced former bobsleigh champion who’s absconded to Jamaica to sulk), and Doug as Sanka, an aimless life-of-the-party type who’s coaxed to join the team mainly because he’s best friends with the comparatively laser-focused Derice and loves to compete in local pushcart derbies. 

Malik Yoba, Leon Robinson, Doug E. Doug, and Rawle D. Lewis in Cool Runnings.

There’s much cultural-difference comedy in Cool Runnings once its main characters arrive in subzero Calgary. It might be in Canada and mostly French-speaking, but in the movie it’s almost framed like a country-bumpkin section of America. The score suddenly goes rodeo-adjacent as the young men marvel at the coldness of the air (“What are you smoking?” one character dead-seriously asks another) and as they dig around their enviably colorful-outerwear-full suitcases to better ward off cold they didn’t expect to be this cold. (Cool Runnings thankfully never slides into mean-spirited punching-down gags that might make you feel like you’re laughing at the characters.)

Doug is usually the source of the movie’s bigger laughs — whenever there’s fish-out-of-water comedy, he’s the one who’s doing the most slapstick version of it, like when he eagerly line-dances at a bar after one race or reveals that he’s been smuggling hot-water bottles under his clothes during races to keep warm — and the film in general tonally syncs up with his character. He takes what’s going on seriously, but he’s having fun with it, too. 

Director Jon Turteltaub’s light, TV-like touch is suitable for a script that’s generally sunny. Everything feels practically promised to be all right the moment something goes wrong. One might wish, though, that the film treated the racism the characters face from their pompous, nearly universally European rivals more thoughtfully than people merely needing to be won over, and that it grappled more with the darkness at the heart of the Candy character’s fall from grace. But in the Disney-sanctioned Cool Runnings, adversity needn’t be dwelled on too much. It’s too busy reveling in the victories of a story that mostly makes you not mind its sometimes gooey sentimentalities.