Macho men on wheels

How do you make a film about quadriplegics that neither patronises them nor uses sentiment to gain an audience's sympathy? It's a difficult job, but this documentary from Dana Adam Shapiro, Jeffery Mandel and Henry Alex Rubin carries it off. It's not exactly a work of art, often seeming rough and ready. But it is certainly artful on an emotional level.

We follow American and Canadian wheelchair rugby teams as they compete first in national championships and then at the Olympics. They are highly competitive, totally obsessed with their " murderball" sport and are long past feeling sorry for themselves.

Two in particular are fixed with the camera's beady eye. One is Team USA's star player Mark Zupan, the other is Joe Soares who, when ditched from the team because of his age, flounces off to coach the Canadians.

Neither is exactly ingratiating and, as their family and friends attest, have exactly the same macho virtues and vices they had before they were crippled. It's a sports film that just happens to be populated by the disabled, which allows us to discover what it means when you can't do the simplest of everyday tasks (including sex). One sequence may at last put paid to the question most abled people want to ask, but seldom dare.

Murderball has the great merit of not aspiring to the politically correct, since its participants can't be bothered to mince their words. "He was an asshole before his accident and he's an asshole now," says someone of Zupan. "The more pitiful I am, the more women like me," says another, grinning broadly.

There is a basic honesty at work which, along with the plain-speaking of its real-life cast, makes you feel that Murderball will appeal most to the disabled. And if they like it, we should too, for it wouldn't be doing its job if quadriplegics found in it a basinful of Hollywood-style fakery.

Murderball
Cert: 15