Endurance

The subject is Ethiopian runner Haile Gebrselassie, who won the men’s 10,000-meter race at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Director Leslie Woodhead’s disjointed, boring film is a hodgepodge of documentary race footage (directed by Bud Greenspan) interspersed with re-enactments from Gebrselassie’s life in which his own relatives play roles (a nephew plays Gebrselassie as a child). There was a rash of this sort of thing in the 1950s, when Bob Mathias, Elroy “Crazylegs” Hirsch and Jackie Robinson all played themselves in movies with the standard ordeal-and-triumph clichés of sports biopics. But ethnographer Woodhead is more interested in the Ethiopian background than in his central character; he dawdles over mundane details while important information is relegated to printed afterthoughts.