Going Vertical

The year was 1970. The senior men's Soviet Union national basketball team had changed its head coach. The team's new head coach, Vladimir Garanzhin (Vladimir Kondrashin), who was also the head coach of the Leningrad based BC Spartak basketball club, of the USSR Premier League; said at a press conference that at the Munich Summer Olympic Games, the Soviet Union was going to beat the U.S. men's national basketball team. The statements of the coach frightened Soviet sports officials, for whom their main goal was to perform strongly at the world's biggest sporting stage, in the year of the 50th anniversary of the Soviet Union, and keep their posts.

Vladimir Garanzhin completely changed the composition of the Soviet team, and it was no longer dominated by CSKA Moscow players, but instead the players from several different clubs of the country. Garanzhin also began training the team with new coaching techniques; he needed to inspire the team, and convince the players that they could beat the American team.

It was the night of 9 to 10 September 1972. The city of Munich, which had survived a terrorist attack three days earlier, had continued to host sports competitions at the Summer Olympic Games. The long-awaited finale of the XX Olympic Summer Basketball Tournament had finally arrived. The two final teams, as had been predicted by Garanzhin, were the USSR and U.S. teams. Up to the decisive game, both teams were unbeaten. And the outcome of the dramatic final match was decided in the last three seconds of the game...

Even before the release of the film, it aroused sharp criticism from Yevgenia Kondrashina and Alexandra Ovchinnikova (widows of Vladimir Kondrashin and Alexander Belov), and Yuri Kondrashin (son of Vladimir Petrovich). In their opinion, the authors of the film plunged into their private lives, and included information about it in the script without their consent.

The film received positive feedback from Russian media obviously, but one thing is clear it's propaganda movie. [2][3][4][5], КГ-Портал[6][7][8]

The popular Russian Youtube blogger and film critic BadComedian was highly critical of the film. In a two-hour critical response,[9] he accused the filmmakers of plagiarizing the 2004 American film Miracle and scathed at numerous, glaring historical inaccuracies (which attracted lawsuits from the families of some of the players portrayed in the film) as well as the tendency to subtly weave political views and messages into the film; for example, turning Modestas Paulauskas, an avid pro-Soviet player, into an anti-Soviet dissident under watch by the KGB. BadComedian also scathed the plot, suggesting that it had a total lack of any logic and was made solely to arouse emotions in viewers. Following the publication, Going Vertical rapidly dropped out of the top-10 Russian movies on Kinopoisk and BadComedian's response to it, which gathered more views than the film itself (32 million), was praised by the families of some of the players shown in the film.[10][11][12]

According to the United Federal Automated Information System on Movie Screenings in Cinema Halls (UAIS), the gross of the film, as of 2018, amounted to more than ₽2.9 billion[13] ($54 million), making the picture the higgest-grossing film in the history of modern Russian film distribution (post-Soviet era).[14][15][16][17]

It also became the highest-grossing Russian film in China, where it grossed CN¥85 million ($12.3 million).[18] That brought the film's worldwide gross to $66.3 million.

• Legend No. 17
• List of basketball films

• Going Vertical at IMDb 
• Going Vertical at AllMovie