The Great Alaskan Race

The Great Alaskan Race is the vigorous, heartbreaking film about that true story that will leave you cheering.

Brian Presley wrote, directed, produced, and stars in The Great Alaskan Race, and his reverence for the dire situation and heroics of the mushers are evident throughout. However, passion alone does not make a good movie.

The Great Alaskan Race reaches for those tears, but may best be appreciated by being the most historically accurate — if fictionalized and not wholly complete — version of this story we’re likely to get.

In addition to his acting duties, Presley also wrote and directed the film. But while he provides beard and brawn as the heroic musher, he struggles with the technical challenges of editing and staging the run.

Although earnest to a fault and certainly fulfilling its goal of being family-friendly entertainment, The Great Alaskan Race ultimately proves less exciting and not nearly as adorable as Balto, the 1995 animated film inspired by the same events.

With its general tone of inspirational uplift that’s too often spelled out in dialogue rather than felt, The Great Alaskan Race bears the same relation to “faith-based entertainment” that it does to action-adventure cinema: It gestures in that direction, yet doesn’t actually make the commitment.

It’s the banal dialogue, lack of tension, one-note characterizations and overly earnest acting — even by such veterans as Treat Williams, Bruce Davison and Henry Thomas — that conspire to turn this potentially moving and exciting picture into mush.