"Iron Will" is yet another of a recent series of Disney pictures in which one or more plucky youngsters excel at a colorful sport while overcoming great obstacles and saving the family farm.
Usually they save the farm only metaphorically, but in this case, a literal farm is at stake; after 17-year-old Will Stoneman's dad dies, it's up to Will (Mackenzie Astin) to win the $20,000 prize in a 500-mile dogsled race, in order to pay off the mortgage.
After "Cool Runnings," about a Jamaican bobsled team, and "The Air Up There," about an African who becomes a U.S. basketball star, "Iron Will" kinda makes you wonder what's next. How about a kid from Sri Lanka who dreams of becoming the world's best thumb wrestler? Some Evanstonians who yearn to be champion pearl divers? There are certain obligatory scenes that define the genre. First we see the hero in ordinary everyday circumstances (Will delivers the mail by dogsled in the frozen reaches of North Dakota). Then we get a brief glimpse of his cheerful home life (Dad and Mom want him to go to college). Then a turning point is reached. (Dad drowns under the ice when his dogsled overturns - not altogether necessarily, in my book. It looked to me as if he could have saved himself, crawling hand over hand up the dogsled, but of course if he'd lived the movie would have been over, so his grip loosens and he disappears beneath the frigid torrent.) The bank threatens foreclosure. Then the kid gets a dream: He'll enter the dangerous $20,000 dogsled race, with a first prize offered by the wealthy railroad magnate J. P. Harper (played by David Ogden Stiers, who has been a brilliant actor ever since we starred together in "Gaslight" at Urbana High School). I was willing to bet $5 that Will's mom would say, "I've lost my husband and I don't want to lose a son." I would have collected. Next, of course, is the Training Sequence, in which a venerable coach-figure puts the kid through a harrowing ordeal.