Rank

Eschewing the jock-like aversion to "artiness" inherent in most sports docs, John Hyams's contemplative snapshot of professional bull riding, Rank, ups the ante for the form.

At the Professional Bull Riders championships, a rough animal is called "rank." In this skillful documentary, you can almost hear the cracking bones as brave and/or stupid riders attempt to stay on these snorting 2,000-pound monsters for eight seconds.

As thorough an examination of the sport as you could hope to squeeze into 90 taut, well-organized minutes.

It's hard to tell whether Hyams' subjects are exceptionally nice guys or whether there's an excess of decency on the PBR circuit, but if even one were more conspicuously flawed, the film might be more compelling.

Both in terms of the activities and characters depicted, Rank doesn't truly manage to sustain interest for the course of its feature-length running time.

That final night of competition is exciting stuff, capped by a heroic victory ride, but this is otherwise a plodding feature about decent young people in a rough-and-tumble sport that makes you wonder how many IQ points they have being bucked around inside their heads.