Undefeated (Friday, February 17, 2012) (12)

Ever since Hoop Dreams, documentarians have been obsessed with movies about sports teams, particularly ones in inner cities. In the past few years there has been a rash of mediocre ones that have minor interest and bad scripts. Considering this background, Undefeated, directed by Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin, is a real triumph as it tells a very compelling story of a football team, focuses on a few interesting and exciting kids and uses some wonderful moments to tell a heart-warming tale of success despite poor odds.

This is not a film about a high school team going undefeated over the course of a season, after all, they lose their first game only a few minutes into the film. The title refers more to the concept of not being beaten down and not giving up. It's the philosophy of the team's hero coach, Bill Courtney.

Courtney is a slightly out of shape middle aged white guy who owns a lumber supply company in Memphis. Following his life-long dream of coaching a football team, five years ago he became the volunteer head coach of the Manassas Tigers in North Memphis. Manassas High School was recently rebuilt, so their physical facilities look nice, but the student body comes from very poor families with very little support. The school has a history of being one of the worst football teams in Tennessee for most of the last 40 years, but through hard work and discipline, Courtney has turned them back into a contender.

We follow star linemen O.C. Brown and Montrail "Money" Brown (not related), who are two of the senior leaders of the team, either physically or in effort and drive. O.C. is a typical giant of a lineman who struggles with his grades as he gets interest from many division 1A college football programs. Meanwhile, Money is a great student, but is a bit undersized to play on the line, so he makes up for his physical deficiencies by working twice as hard on the field.

At some point another kid, Chavis Daniels, gets out of juvee, where he spent about two years for assault, and continues to have issues with controlling his anger and his mouth. He gets in fights with coaches and other players and Courtney has to figure out how to use him on the field and how to not give up on him, as that would be a veritable death sentence for the young man.

Formally documentaries are difficult to inject too much style into, as their primary purpose is to explain something. Non-fiction is simply not as expressive and malleable a medium to easily make beauty. There is one moment in this film, however, that is one of the loveliest moments from a documentary I can think of in a long time. It's subtle and was probably the result of a lucky camera man shooting the right thing at the right moment, rather than being scripted by a director, but it's powerful and perfect for a moment. A tip of my cap to the directors for connecting two disparate elements from two parts of a film into one lovely shot.

This film is one of the five nominees for Best Documentary Feature and it would be very deserving of the prize were it to win. It's a very good film, unsentimental, efficient and well made. Considering it probably could have done well just being OK (like so many other recent sports team docs), I consider that a great achievement.

Stars: 3 of 4

Moneyball (Thursday, October 6, 2011) (85)

Ever since the Michael Lewis book The Blind Side became a box office behemoth, Hollywood has decided to moviefy each of his nonfiction books. This movie is the result of the second effort down this path, an adaptation of the book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. The film tells the story of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) who was the Oakland A's general manager in the early aughts, where he built an LCS-competing team with a very small budget by using sabermeterics, a mathematical approach to statistics that puts value on non-traditional elements of the game. In other words, this is a move version of a boring baseball story that happened a few years ago. The film is almost totally without any characters of interest and gives us almost no view into who these people are. It's about as exciting and interesting as a history text book would be about this topic. To make matters even more strange, Beane doesn't really succeed in what he was trying to accomplish (his teams never got to a World Series), so his experiment never proves to be a winner. If you care about baseball you might care about this movie, but as a movie, there's really nothing very interesting in it. The story is boring, director Bennett Miller seems to not be interested in looking into the minds of his characters and the acting is generally pretty dull.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

The Fighter (Saturday, December 18, 2010) (157)

It seems like these days every year has to have a boxing movie - or at least a movie about poor white people in Massachusetts. This year that film is The Fighter. It is basically just a boxing movie with almost nothing more interesting about it than that.

The story is about Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), a white boxer in Lowell, Massachusetts, who has had a good, but less than totally impressive career. He's training for an upcoming fight that his mother Alice (Melissa Leo), who is also his manager, has set up for him. He has two trainers, a local cop and his brother, Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale), a former boxer who is a local hero because he knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard once in a great fight. Now Dicky is a crack addict who never shows up on time to train his brother because he's either smoking crack or stoned from smoking recently.

At the opening of the film there is a crew from HBO Sports shooting a documentary on Dicky, about how he went from such a promising boxer to a crackhead wasteoid in just a few years. Dicky thinks the whole time that they are doing a profile piece on him as a champion, but they are really just focusing on his addiction.

Micky meets Charlene (Amy Adams), a bartender at the local watering hole, and they fall in love. She's very concerned that he's flushing his talent away working with the losers in his family. One night, Dicky gets in a fight and a chase with the cops and Micky comes out to help him. He gets his hand broken and has to rebuild his career, including taking better control of his training and management. This upsets the balance of his family, who all defend or ignore Dicky's addiction and puts Charlene at odds with his mother and sisters (he has, like, eight sisters... which is actually sorta funny... in a good way).

More than anything else, this film has gotten a tremendous amount of press for the acting - mostly the performances by Christian Bale and Melissa Leo. I was honestly not totally impressed with either of them. They're both very showy roles that allow the actors to dive into a big pool and get wet. I think the best performance in the film is Amy Adams as Charlene. She's a very smart woman who knows what she wants and can generally get it. She has an wonderfulness about her (Adams is cute, after all), but a very endearing frankness as well (she has a tramp stamp tattoo, which suggests a less-than-angelic side). She's a sweetheart who will tell you to go fuck yourself is she needs to. She totally lights up the screen whenever she's on. It's a much more subtle performance than the others, and I think much better.

(I should say here that Bale's performance is very good, but it feels more like a very good impersonation of a guy who is rolling on crack. I never saw the depth in his characters as I did in Adams'. In the opening moment of the film, however, when he's being interviewed by HBO, he is really amazingly believable as a guy on drugs.)

The biggest problem with the film is the script, which is really badly organized, relies mostly on terrible boxing movie cliches (He's a boxer and he gets his hand broken! Oh no!), has lots of terrible dialogue (there's a scene with Dicky telling Micky, "I coulda been a contender!") and is mostly really boring sequences much too heavy on dialogue that doesn't move the story along. There is not that much boxing in this film (basically three bouts).

Director David O. Russell actually does a beautiful job technically with the boxing scenes (and with lots of the technical things here). Most of the boxing matches are seen through a TV signal - as if we were watching the fights on our couch in our living rooms. This is a very clever, original twist to the boxing movie. There is a lot that is made about Micky getting a fight on HBO (especially after the doc on Dicky hurts him so badly), that when we see him in his big match, we watch it as if it was on TV. Very clever.

One other really nice moment by Russell is in the bar when Micky first meets Charlene. There is a wonderful amount of background noise that surrounds them (it's almost reminiscent of Altman's sound use in McCabe and Mrs. Miller), and as they begin talking and she warms up to him (because he's goddamn charming), the noise recedes and you just hear the two of them talking. It's an elegant and nice effect.

As nice a job as Russell does with most of the film, this never really feels like a David O. Russell movie. I think of him as a master of black comedies. Even his most serious stuff (Spanking the Monkey and Three Kings) are very, very funny and are told with a wink throughout. This is much too serious and feels sorta like a director-for-hire piece rather than a Russell piece. He doesn't really do historical stories (Three Kings is a fictional fantasy piece set in a historical time and place).

Mostly this is just a particularly uninspired piece. It's not bad at all, it's just not much of anything. I feel here like I feel with a lot of movies, that I would rather just watch a documentary on Micky Ward rather than have to watch this. The film is as much about his brother (it is really about Dicky totally) and his crazy mother and family as it is about him. It doesn't really know what it wants to be, a boxing drama, a tale of drug use, a story of an effed up family. It's sorta none of those in the end.

Stars: 2 of 4

Secretariat (Monday, October 11, 2010) (135)

Secretariat is based on the biography of the great horse by Bill Nack that he wrote in 1975. It is important to note that the official billing says the film is "suggested by" Nack's book, which is an important distinction because it really plays fast and loose with history. I guess one reason for this is that the film is really a story about Penny Tweedy, the main owner of the horse, and some details were added to make her more of an interesting character.


In 1969, Penny Tweedy (Diane Lane) is a Denver housewife with four kids and a loving husband. She's busy doing typical housewifey tings when she gets a call that her mother has just died and her father is now suffering from dementia. She flied back to Virginia to her family's horse farm that her father has turned into a successful business. While there, she is told that due to the estate taxes involved after a death, the family would be better off selling the farm and all the horses.


Penny seems to be a very smart lady with a nose for horses and she resists her brother's and husband's pleas to sell, instead deciding to fire the horse trainer who has been stealing from them and hire Lucian Laurin (John Malkovich) a trainer with a good reputation. Lucian quickly begins to train the farm's newest foal a big red horse that will ultimately be called Secretariat.


Secretariat is a tremendous horse from the get-go. He has a tremendous lineage a huge size. He begins racing as a 2-year-old in 1972 and wins a ton of races and ultimately is named Horse of the Year, an unusual achievement for a horse of his age. Just as this happens, Penny's father dies, bringing back the calls for the sale of the horse to pay for the taxes. They might be able to get as much as $7million for him - a record price. Penny doesn't want to sell him and instead sells shares in him, but retains control. She then has to hold her breath during the Triple-Crown season of 1973 to see if her decision was wise or not.


There are a ton if things wrong with the story, it's hard to know where to start. For one thing, Penny Tweedy was actually involved in her father's farm for awhile before she is in the film, and even owned Riva Ridge, the horse that won the Derby and Belmont in 1972 (the year before Secretariat won those). The really interesting story (as it is beautifully told in the book) is that Penny loved Riva Ridge more than Secretariat and rather resented that the red horse took attention away from her favorite. I guess this story was cut out for efficiency, but I think it could have been rolled in somewhere - especially if the film is really about her and not the horse.


The film is made by Disney and has a very saccharine, boring feeling about it throughout. Diane Lane does a good job with the role, but it is so shallow there's not much for her to work with. Director Randall Wallace does a very bad job here and misses at least two of the most exciting parts of Secretariat's story almost completely. The scene when they are selling shares in the horse is told in the book in a wonderfully dramatic and cinematic way (when reading it, I thought about how it would be turned into a scene in a film). Here, the scene falls flat and never really raises any excitement or interest at all.


One thing I'm really upset about it the treatment of the Preakness. Secretariat's most famous win is certainly the Belmont, which he won by 31 lengths, but possibly his most dramatic was the Preakness where he started out from behind (as he did in nearly all of his races) and then made his move to the front of the pack on the first turn. This is really never done in horse racing because it requires the horse to take a wider line around the bend, effectively running a longer race than the others. That Secretariat did that in this race was for many the most impressive feat. In this film, we see the race on the television in the Tweedy house and can barely see the move on the grainy TV screen. What a shame!


I would not recommend this film at all, but would strongly recommend Nack's book, Secretariat: The Making of a Champion. I think that is a much more interesting and exciting telling of the story than this very polished and trite film.


Stars: 1.5 of 4

Big Fan (2009) (Tuesday, January 19, 2010) (217)

Big Fan is a small gritty drama about a loser parking lot attendant (Patton Oswalt) who is obsessed with the New York Giants. He works nights and spends time in his booth listening to sports talk radio and writing long slams at the Giants' next opponents that he reads on air when he calls in to the show. One night, he sees his favorite player pumping gas near his house in Staten Island. He and his buddy follow the guy into Manhattan and into a strip club. When Oswalt approaches the player to talk to him, the player beats the crap out of him. Oswalt then has to decide whether he will press charges against the player and possibly hurt his beloved team by getting the player suspended.

The story is very clever, tight and follows a pretty honest, realistic path for any superfans around the world (I could easily see a similar story playing out in England with soccer or Canada with hockey, for instance). It moves along quickly and keeps a good pace throughout. There are a few details, though, in the script (or in the direction) that are frustrating and badly executed (like how Oswalt doesn't make his calls to the radio station from a mobile phone outside of his mother's house where he lives, rather than in his childhood bedroom where his mother can hear him and get upset that he's keeping her awake). This is the first directing gig for Robert D. Siegel (who also wrote this film as well as The Wrestler) and perhaps with a bit more time, small things like this will be ironed out in his work.

Oswalt's performance is really great (he had a fabulous 2009, by the way, with this and two supporting performances in Observe and Report and The Informant!). He is pitiful but likable and is totally convincing in his blind dedication to his team and his sad life. He knows it's sad, but it's good for him. He's lazy and somewhat limited, but he enjoys the power and attention he gets from his nightly talk radio calls. He likes being seen as someone who knows something about stuff and enjoys the power he feels from his minor celebrity with listeners.

I think part of what makes the movie enjoyable is that we all know people roughly like Oswalt. We see the guy at work with the football team flag or schedule; we know friends who travel out of town for their team (even for a sure loss); we know people who do fantasy leagues sports and are obsessed with minutiae of sports. This movie feels like a plausible scenario in the modern world of superfandom and it's intimate, small-budget look lends a nice patina to the little story.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Rudo y Cursi (Tuesday, December 22, 2009) (205)

Rudo y Cursi is a totally fresh and funny comedy from writer/director Carlos Cuaron, brother of Alfonso Cuaron and co-writer of Y Tu Mama Tambien. For this film, Cuaron teams up with the two actors who made Tu Mama so good, Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna.

Here they play brothers in a poor Mexican town who play soccer on the weekends. One day, a scout for major league soccer teams visits their town and offers them the chance to play professionally. The brothers ultimately move to Mexico City and play for two different clubs, Luna as a goalie and Bernal as a forward. Both get wrapped up in off-field silliness (Bernal in a ridiculous Pop music singing career and Luna in gambling).

The two lead actors are fantastic. They are silly and work well with the rather gonzo nature of the story. They wear the ridiculous costumes well and are both totally believable as country bumpkin rubes lost in the big city with millions of dollars (tens of millions of pesos) at their fingertips. They work well together and it seems clear that the actors are friends off-screen and enjoy working next to each other. They really seam like competing brothers and that connection helps to push the story along well.

The writing is also hilarious and has a nice, easy, tight story. I smiled basically the whole time I watched the film and really like the simple device at the end, which could be a bit too neat, but worked well in this small movie. I give Cuaron all sorts of credit for writing something so fresh in a genre (sports, family comedy) that could be otherwise so overdone.

Stars: 3 of 4

Invictus (Saturday, December 12, 2009) (192)

I don't get this movie at all. I understand that Clint Eastwood, who has become the wise old man of American cinema in recently years (especially with the passing of Robert Altman a few years ago), would want to make a movie about Nelson Mandela. I also understand that he would want Morgan Freeman to play Mandela as he looks an incredible amount like him. What I don't get, though, is why the hell he would waste his Mandela picture on a freaking rugby movie.

Americans don't care about rugby - we barely know about the sport. There are three baseball movies that Americans like: Field of Dreams, The Natural and Major League (I love Eight Men Out, Bang the Drum Slowly and For Love of the Game, but I don't think anyone has seen them). There are two football movies that Americans like: Rudy and maybe Remember the Titans. There is one basketball movie that Americans like: Hoosiers. There are no movies that Americans know and like - sorry Slap Shot. Americans don't give a crap about soccer - and no, Bend it Like Beckham is not a soccer movie and nobody has seen it anyhow. Americans couldn't tell a rugby scrum from try from a test if they were chasing them down a pitch.

At any rate, this movie begins with Nelson Mandela being released from jail where he had been for 27 years. Not-so-subtly Eastwood shows a car taking Mandela down a road, where on one side is a posh private school for white Afrikaners who are practicing rugby on their lush green grass and on the other side of the road, you see a bunch of black children in a burnt-out muddy field playing soccer. The Afrikaner rugby coach says to his boys something like, 'Remember this day, lads- this is the day our country went to the dogs.' Oh! Aha!
Thanks, Clint!

OK - so the next scene is some four years later after Mandela has been elected president and is now taking office. There are hundreds of problems he has to deal with, from massive unemployment to bringing business investment back to his country after worldwide boycotts of South African products and industry to dealing with the aftermath of the Apartheid system. In addition to these issues, Mandela sees rugby as a key to bringing white and black South Africans together. The only problem is that the whites love rugby and the blacks prefer soccer - or if they know anything about rugby, they root against the national team, the Springboks, who were a symbol of the hateful system of the past.

The Springboks are not a very strong team anyhow. Their captain, Francois Pienaar, a nice middle-aged Afrikaner (played by Matt Damon), says the right things to the press about how they have to work harder, but is rather out of options on how to make his team good enough to do well in the Rugby World Cup of 2005, a year away. So Mandela becomes friends with Pienaar hoping he can inspire the man or his team to win. Mandela sees winning the World Cup as a way of bridging the white-black divide in the country.

Despite looking just like Mandela, Freeman really struggles with his South African accent. At times it sounds like a typical accent of any African man, and at other times, it gets weak and sounds either English or Southern American. For me, this was distracting and constantly reminded me that it was Freeman and not Mandela. I know this is something I shouldn't say, but I strongly feel that Freeman doesn't do a great job with this role. Damon is fine - though he's given so little to work with that it's hard to tell if his performance is good or bad. Mostly he has a solid Afrikaans accent and looks like he's internally struggling a lot.

The emotion in the film comes from sharp juxtapositions between an old Apartheid-era symbol or saying and the new era of Truth and Reconciliation. At one point, when Mandela goes to a rugby match, he walks out to the field and we see many fans waving the old Apartheid-era flags - the same flag under which he had done his prison time. Another time we see the Pienaar family (Francois, his wife and parents) sitting around their living room talking about how much they don't like Mandela and his new government, while their black maid stands in the kitchen making them food, clearly loving the new administration. When the South African team makes it to the final match against New Zealand, Francois gives his parents and wife tickets to the event - and also gives a ticket to the maid. It all so easy and sappy - it makes me want to puke.

What I hated most about the film was the manipulation by Eastwood to make us think one way or another about characters and events. The most glaring of these devises was the choice to have the Springbok team only speak to one another in English - even though they all certainly spoke Afrikaans in the locker room or at home. This makes us feel somewhat warm toward the players. At the same time, Mandela's white security guards speak among themselves in Afrikaans - basically to make us not trust them. This is all ridiculous. Sure, there were lots of white South Africans who spoke English, but most Afrikaners spoke, and continue to speak, Afrikaans. It would be like having one group of Nazis in a movie speak German and another speak English - we would automatically like the English-speaking Nazis more than the German-speaking Nazis - regardless of what they were saying.

On top of all the crap in the film, what is really unforgivable is that the rugby scenes are so badly directed, you have no idea what is going on and what they are doing. I happen to know the general rules of the game, but I can't imagine many American viewers do. Yet, we are only given a very quick lesson about some of the rules (ham-handedly when the team goes to teach some poor black kids how to play) and never really find out how you score points. As a result, the drama is much lowered when we see the players in the final match running around passing the ball seemingly aimlessly.

We don't know what it means that New Zealand has a gigantic player who is hard to tackle; we don't know what happens when you get tackled or why players punt the ball to the other team when they're running; we don't understand what the hell is going on in the scrum or why they're doing that. The worst part is that considering the final match has an overtime period in it, we never know how much time is left in the game - so we see a clock at 9:51 and we don't know if that's 9 seconds left or 9:51 left (are they counting up or down) - or if it is a 20-minute period (which is what I thought). It's a big mess.

Overall the writing of this is clumsy and the direction is pretty awful. There are several times when Eastwood shoots a scene simply from the wrong angle or direction. There are some tear-jerking moments, as one would expect from such a movie. There is rising music and slow motion shots of guys hugging and celebrating. This is pretty banal and dull. I would much rather have seen a biopic about Mandela (with Freeman playing him, perhaps) or a story about his struggles in his first few years in office - or a movie just about the rugby team without the social/political back-story. In the end we get a bunch of half movies. A half sports movie, a half political history, a half Mandela story.

Stars: 1 of 4

The Blind Side (Monday, December 7, 2009) (189)

I have always been skeptical of Sandra Bullock and her alleged appeal. She has never really done much for me. I guess she has a nice body, but I've never found her especially *hot* - and always found her acting so pedestrian (if not outright bad) that it's barely worth mentioning. As a result of this, I was very worried about The Blind Side, a film where she plays a Southern WASP who takes in a poor black kid with a hard past and a good heart.

I figured this role would be beyond her abilities and she would junk it up trying to stretch to it (like how she stretched in The Proposal). I was surprised by her performance, though, as it was pretty solid and not too overdone. The film overall is good, not great, but also not terrible.

Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron) is a giant of a teen who looks like a football lineman from across the room (or from outer space). His childhood in Memphis was terribly traumatic and he has been left homeless without any friends or family. After he is offered a spot in a tony parochial school, he is taken in by the Touhy family. Mother Leigh Anne (Bullock) and father Sean (Tim 'Yeah, My Daddy's Name Was Tug, Fuck You' McGraw) are a super rich couple with two kids who live in a magnificent mansion 'on the right side of town'.

The Touhys are huge Ole Miss boosters (for the non-football fans out there, that's the University of Mississippi and their mascot is a mustachioed plantation owner with guns ablazin' - classy) and realize that if they can get Michael to learn how to block in football, he can be a great offensive lineman in high school, college and the NFL. In order to do that, he has to work hard to get his grades up, keep out of trouble, not slip back in with the gangs in his old neighborhood and deal with whatever demons he has in his head.

There are two ways of looking at this movie: As a story of a tough-luck kid who is trying to transform his life into something better; or, as a story of a football player who works hard to make a name for himself and changes his life by playing football. The first story is rather trite and saccharine full of all sorts of tearful moments where he tells his family that he loves them. The second story falls totally flat as the football scenes are terribly choreographed and shot.

The main football scene - somewhere around the mid-point of the film, involves Michael's first game (it seems his first season playing is his senior year and he's mostly playing because of his size, rather than his talent). In it, he gets beat on the block time and time again by a fast linebacker/defensive end (it's high school ball - it's hard to tell what position the kids is playing). He figures out that he has to block the guy between his pads and drive him backward. He does this - and then proceed with one of the strangest plays ever, driving the guy backwards 50-some yards.

Rather than showing us the block or the play that results in the hole he opened up, director John Lee Hancock shows us the reactions of his family, Bullock, McGraw and Co., in the stands. This is dumb. I will admit that it must be really hard to make a movie about a non-skill position (quarterback, running back, wide receiver), but the answer to that problem is not to cut away and not show the play. It should be to show us his block or show the block and cut to the running back going down field to the end zone. The 'big uglies', as Keith Jackson would say, deserve better than to concentrate on their sassy mothers.

On top of this, many of the football scenes are used as comic relief with a buffoon coach in an almost-Necessary-Roughness-style farce. This neither helps tell the story, nor does it set the right tone for the film. That Michael has trouble being physically brutal the way he needs to in order to play well tells more about his psychology than about him being a 'gentle giant'. This should have been handled better.

In the second half of the film, after Michael has become a major football star, he is pursued by all SEC football programs from South Carolina to Arkansas. Again, this part is played as a joke - which is a mistake considering this leads to the heart and soul of the movie - that Michael feels loved by his family and football is one way they can mutually show that love.

(One of the jokes in this sequence is that all of the SEC coaches shown are no longer at the schools they are recruiting for. Phil Fulmer recruits for Tennessee - he left after the 2008 season; Nick Saban recruits for LSU - he left after the 2004 season and now coaches for Alabama; Houston Nutt recruits for Arkansas - he left after the 2007 season and now coaches Ole Miss; Ed Orgeron recruits for Ole Miss, though he strangely never gives his name - he left after the 2007 season; Lou Holtz recruits for South Carolina - he left after the 2004 season and now slurs his words on ESPN; Tommy Tuberville recruits for Auburn - he resigned after the 2008 season. This is funny in a college-football world, but I think totally falls flat on 90% of the audience. Then again, I don't live in SEC-country, so maybe it plays better in the South.)

The acting throughout is pretty good. This is clearly the best role and best performance of Bullock's career - and it's a good thing too considering she's currently the biggest female box office draw in America. She is sweet, serious and sarcastic when necessary. She talks down her bigoted friends at lunch who worry about having a 'black boy' in her house (a totally unnecessary, badly written scene, by the way) and stares down the hoodlums in the housing project where Michael's mother lives. McGraw is also good - playing an up-tight fast food franchisee with great ease and talent. The young son, SJ, is played by Jae Head who played the same role in the television version of Friday Night Lights and Hancock. Someday he'll grow up and become more than just an excitable young boy.

Quinton Aaron does a very nice job playing Michael. He is very vulnerable and sweet and the pain he feels comes through well. I wish he had given a bit more for me to bite into with the performance (he's basically binary: sweet or scared), but that could be the writing and directing as much as his performance.

The script, also by Hancock, is probably the worst part of the film. Throughout it doesn't know if its a comedy or a drama (it's a drama) and it very easily tosses aside characters who we see once and never again. In the opening scene we see Michael with his brother. After this, we never see the brother again. Later, we meet a teacher who believes in Michael's potential, played by Kim Dickens, but after about three scenes, she falls out of the movie as well.

In addition to this, there is a strange sexual tension between Michael and his adopted sister. Several times we see her looking sexually turned on by him (he, on the other hand, is totally neutered), but this never goes anywhere. Even if this actually happened, it doesn't help tell the story and just comes in as noise beside the main thread (it's also weird and borderline racist, I think, to have a story about a white girl who is sexually mystified by a big black man).

This movie should have been cut by about 15 minutes. It runs more than two hours and the extra time is not necessary. The script is a mess and the direction is not wonderful. Bullock, McGraw and Aaron are good and there's the nucleus of a good story buried inside it. This movie has a lot to offer, but is not wonderful.

Stars: 2 of 4