Dir. Gary Fleder, 129mins, USA, 2008
Cast: Rob Brown, Dennis Quaid, Darren Dewitt Henson, Charles S Dutton.
Review by Matthew Rodgers
Ernie Davis (Brown) was something of a legend, even those with little interest in that most confusing of US sports would know that there was more to this young African-American athlete than his handling of the pigskin. Winner of the Heisman Trophy (a sort of, most valuable player award) and a figurehead for the black rights movement, Davis regularly suffered at the hands of racists, both on and off the field. But it’s not spoiling anything to tell you that the hook of Fleders biopic is that prior to a 1962 All-Star College game Davis was diagnosed with leukaemia and never took to the field again. Stirring and genuinely moving stuff in the annuls of history but recreated here as a tepid TV-movie that just about makes it to 4th down and 1 yard (that’s just shy of failure to the uneducated).
Dennis Quaid himself appears to be turning into a sports movie cliché, with The Rookie and Any Given Sunday he has mastered the role of grizzly old mentor, he is good at it, but its just another reason to pass this up as “just another American football movie”.
The drama is replaced with schmaltz, even though the inspirational, yet unavoidably tragic final moments are sensitively handled, and the action is derivative. You have to do something in this micro-genre to make it stand out from the offensive pack, Oliver Stone shot his matches with a kinetic, bone crunching intensity in Sunday, and with the wonderful, but criminally ignored TV series, Friday Night Lights (itself spun-off from the pinnacle of America footie movies in 2004) showing how to balance the drama with the action, by comparison, The Express is a rather misleading title for this plodding drama.
It is about 20mins too long, and a couple of the less exciting set-pieces could have been dropped in favour of more of the superior flashback sequences, but you are never really in doubt as to where the film is heading and only really long for the ever likeable Quaid and Brown to be onscreen, or the overdue credits to roll. Davis deserved a touchdown of a movie, but thanks mainly to the uninspired direction, this is fumbled from start to finish.
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