From left, Bruce Herbelin-Earle as Shorty Hunt, Callum Turner as Joe Rantz and Wil Coban as Jim McMillan in “The Boys in the Boat.”

Perhaps George Clooney had no interest in adding to your holiday stress.

A Christmas Day release, the Clooney-directed “The Boys in the Boat” tells the tale of the 1936 University of Washington rowing team, which competed at the Summer Olympics in Berlin.

Based on Daniel James Brown’s 2013 bestselling book of the same name, “The Boys in the Boat” begins by introducing us to the mild-mannered and generally quiet Joe Rantz (Callum Turner), who years ago was abandoned by his father and stepmother and now, during the Great Depression, lives in a shanty town in Seattle. He attends UW, aiming for a career as an engineer, but he’s struggling to pay tuition.

Joe’s pal Roger Morris (Sam Strike, “American Outlaw”) suggests they try out for the rowing team, as a place on the unit would come with food, lodging and enough money to pay the university.

“All you gotta do is make the team,” the much more talkative Roger says. “How hard can that be?”

Cut to them standing among many other young men with the same thought.

Coach Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton, “Thirteen Lives”) tells those gathered the experience in front of them — conditioning work leading up to actual rowing tryouts — will be incredibly taxing and that there’s no shame if their bodies aren’t up to it. Clooney then treats us to a montage of pushups, situps — even log cutting. (This is Washington state, after all.)

Eight men, including Joe and Roger, as well as an alternate, are selected for the junior boat — essentially the junior varsity squad behind the seasoned UW seniors, who are slated to vie for the Olympic opportunity against counterparts from a few other schools.

However, after replacing the junior crew’s coxswain — the man at the front of the boat, who sits back to the water and barks out pace-based commands and motivational statements — with the more commanding Bobby Moch (Luke Slattery, “The Post”) and achieving the desired improvement, Ulbrickson starts to have ideas about taking his all-important shot with the younger boys instead.

And thus we have a series of obstacles, including but not limited to, besting the seniors, the other schools — including East Coast universities with proud rowing traditions — and then other countries, Nazi Germany among them, for Joe, Roger, Bobby and the boys to overcome before bringing home the gold for the United States.

Clooney and Smith collaborated on the underrated early-pandemic-shot post-apocalyptic adventure “The Midnight Sky,” but their work here is by-the-numbers stuff. Every choice feels obligatory, down to a subplot in which Joe’s behavior threatens to cost him his seat in the boat.

Clooney, who last year took a break from directing to star alongside Julie Roberts in the romantic comedy “Ticket to Paradise,” tends to be hit or miss behind the camera, but “The Boys in the Boats” drifts nicely into an acceptable middle. It never stalls, but it also rows only so furiously.

Most importantly, it accomplishes the goal of shining a light on the boys in that boat — named the Husky Clipper, by the way — who certainly are worthy of some renewed appreciation.

And if Clooney’s also provided a movie at holiday time that a whole big family could agree upon, what’s wrong with that?