House of Flying Arrows, 2016.
Directed by Daniel Harris and Daniel Mendelle.
SYNOPSIS:
A documentary tracing darts’ evolution from humble beginnings through to the glamorous heyday of the 1980s and on into the lucrative professional era.
Have you ever tried to play darts while not at the pub, or at the very least slightly inebriated? Don’t, its terrible. It’s a sport drenched in lager and bathwater ale and stained by the stench of carpets sullied by stale cigarettes. With this, it translates poorly to the big screen. That ramshackle charm of drunken nights spent at dingy pubs is lost, that smell that seems to adhere to everything dissipates in place of cheap perfume and rancid popcorn.
If there is to be a documentary that accurately portrays the joyous chaos of the darts experience, it’s most certainly not House of Flying Arrows, Daniel Mendelle and Daniel Harris’ utterly redundant, borderline insipid descent behind the scenes of “the world of darts and it’s superstars.”
It’s baffling then that the filmmakers decided not to take a look at its deep working class roots, instead choosing to masturbate themselves silly to the annual world championships, and even then, there’s no grand money shot. In place is a weak climax, flaccid and unsightly, as the audience is surrounded by the bulbous bodies of darts superstars and the silhouettes of drunken revelers.
Flashy, spritely visuals attempting to educate fall flat, come off more like grade school science lessons than anything else (a lengthy discussion on how the movement of hands link to brain function is an arduous, borderline idiotic affair). These cut scenes, akin to the rest of the film, have the feel of a short you’d stumble upon late on Sky Sports.
Clear attempts at adding clout to the tepid affair with talking heads of sports stars and neuroscientists again fall flat, with famous faces lacking a certain familiarity. Filmmakers Mendelle and Harris undoubtedly have a lot of love for darts and there infatuation with the sports star as the peak of celebrity is rather warm, but in limiting their focus to attract those with which darts is familiar, they’ve alienated the majority of the audience.
Those supposedly familiar faces: Barry Hearn, Eric Bristow, Phil Taylor, Michael Van Gerwen, Bobby George, maintain alien to anyone with little interest with the sport and Mendelle and Harris seem not to care. Any attempt at adding backstory is diluted by self-satisfactory anecdotes shared by those apparently famous.
There are sporadic, vain attempts at discussing the intricacies of sports psychology and how it is that darts, a sport relying less on fitness more on hand-eye-coordination has become such a success, but both are lost beneath a vacuous, sports channel-lite portrayal of who-really-cares tournament.
A good sports flick, be it fiction or otherwise, hinges on the statement, “does it succeed for those uninterested in the sport.” Senna is the high watermark, even The Class of ’92, Mendelle and Harris’ previous excursion into sports filmmaking succeeds as being somewhat illuminating. House of Flying Arrows succeeds only for those interested in darts, and even then, you’d have to be a super fan to truly care.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Thomas Harris
Originally published October 27, 2016. Updated April 15, 2018.
