Started off with potential and ended with a great speech - but the the rest of the plot in the middle was yuck.

Looks like it was written by a collaboration between 1970s Disney hacks and I really don't know who. What were they thinking. They had a chance to contemporize the plot in a more realistic fashion and completely lost it in its translation into the script.

By way of comparison, examples of two movies on minimal budgets that have caught the spirit of the underdog in very different ways and relevant to our times were Minari and Nomadland.

Over the last years the world, except for US Republican voters, has dramatically changed. Unless they become more relevant to the times, this franchise will go nowhere.