Wick's Review

Summary - Very Good 3.5

A treat for football fans and civil rights era history buffs, this charming and affecting but overly reverential biopic will likely bore everyone else.

That said, excellent performances by Rob Brown, Dennis Quaid and others, top notch production values, and first-rate football action do this important story proud.

Acting - Very Good 3.5

Rob Brown does a credible job as Ernie Davis, while Omar Benson Miller turns in a charming performance as one of his two black teammates.

Of equal interest are the other legendary characters in the story, especially Syracuse coach Ben Schwartzwalder and football/movie star Jim Brown.

An ornery cuss of a coach, the type of which they don’t make any more, Schwartzwalder served with the 82nd Airborne during WWII, where he was awarded a Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, four battle stars, Presidential Unit Citation and was promoted to the rank of Major for his actions during the invasion of Normandy, the Greatest Generation’s greatest battle.¹ So his methods as a football coach – the most martial of sports – are as you might expect: pain and discipline, the former inflicted, the latter endured.

Dennis Quaid does a great job bringing to life this driven man from an bygone era, showing how he was able to grow even though he’d already fought too many battles for one lifetime.

Jim Brown – arguably the greatest football player ever – was and is a complex figure of keen intelligence, frequent courage and social relevance beyond the gridiron. As a black pioneer in the upper echelons of what was then a white man’s world, he set a standard that few could uphold. Davis did.

Darrin Dewitt Henson looks good enough to be Jim Brown (no mean feat), but doesn’t fully convey the great man’s intensity.

The rest of the cast is fine, especially the great Charles S. Dutton as Davis’s saintly grandfather.

¹ Schwartzwalder’s wartime bio excerpt courtesy of Wikipedia.

Film - Very Good 3.5

The movie has much to recommend it, not the least bringing to life heroic football star Ernie Davis. Being the first black Heisman Trophy winner and a colleague of the great Jim Brown marks him as a historical figure of significant note. Serious but not angry, immensely talented but not arrogant, elevated to the heights of celebrity but tragically cut down by leukemia, Davis merits the big screen treatment.

The movie plays all of this up, taking significant liberties with the facts along the way, yet never achieves any more drama than one sees in a football game between a Cotton Bowl winner and a cellar dwelling patsy. While every biopic must wrestle with the limits of a preordained story, this one fails to overcome the challenges of the genre.

Edge - Risqué 1.6

Out and out racism receives full voice here. That Ernie Davis – not to mention Jim Brown, Jackie Robinson and other civil rights pioneers – overcame this remains an accomplishment of heroic proportions.

Reality - Glib 1.3

A game for gladiators, football served (and serves) as a gridiron crucible for race relations in America. Why then did did the movie need to regularly diverge from reality, as documented by ESPN.com’s Jeff Merron in ‘The Express’ in real life?

On the positive side, the movie gets the brutality of football just right, especially during the practice scenes.

1 Comment

• Wick Apr 17, 2010 12:25AM

  Regarding BrianSez’s Review
  “Approaching the team with both a drill-sergeant’s style and a seer’s calculation.”

  Good line.

  - W

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