Critic Reviews

Wind sometimes dawdles, but it’s a sports movie with soul.

Wind is not commonplace movie making. The sailing sequences, including one short, very funny race off Newport involving the kind of small boats you and I might sail, surpass anything I've ever seen on the screen. There are collisions at sea, wrecked spinnakers and freak accidents, like the one during a race when a sailor finds himself hanging upside down from the mast as the other boat gains. These things exhilarate as they threaten to stop the heart.

The real reason to see this movie, though, is because it makes a big yacht race seem so glorious, such grand adventure. Ballard is a former cinematographer with a knack for visualizing the outdoors.

Wind is quite content to keep things at the visual and visceral level, and on that unambitious but highly photogenic plane it's a handsome piece of salt-water escapism. When those sails start popping as they're slapped with gusts of sea air and the tacking gets intense, Wind gives you an adrenaline-filled ride. [11 Sep 1992, p.37]

Wind is a vigorous and colorful piece of filmmaking that never quite shakes free of an embarrassingly trite, formulaic screenplay. [11 Sep 1992, p.H]

Although the reality of the America's Cup series is that it seems elitist and removed from the sweaty tumult of sports in general, Wind succeeds in turning the competition into one that is intense, pictorially compelling and intelligible in terms of basic racing maneuvers. [11 Sep 1992, p.C1]

Wind is a rapturous experience. It's a sporting movie about the spirit of sport that never steps over the line into a win-at-all-costs ethos, or into the hypocrisy of it's-the-way-you-play-the-game-that-counts. [14 Sep 1992]

There is an elemental majesty to sailing that Ballard and his daring crew have magically transferred to the screen, and the consummate skills of the racing crews are a marvel to behold. Still, it's clear that the magic of Wind is in the wind itself, and not always in the movie that blows around it. [11 Sep 1992, p.22]

The real disappointment is that director Carroll Ballard delivers such powerful racing scenes and seascapes that you wish he could have done better on dry land. But you can't argue that Ballard doesn't deliver an original, often breathtaking, view of nature. [17 Sep 1992, p.4E]

Ballard has infused Wind with an old-fashioned romantic sentimentality that is affecting from time to time. But this and everything else that is good about the picture fights an ultimately losing battle against an inept story that feels like it was constructed from bits and pieces of other, presumably more involving films. It's a shame that director Ballard, who has gone many years between features, has had to set out this time in such a leaky and unsound vessel.