Glory Road

GloryRoad, originally uploaded by MertWindu.

Glory Road
Directed by James Gartner
Produced by Glory Road Productions/Jerry Bruckheimer Films/Walt Disney Pictures
Starring Derek Luke, Josh Lucas, Al Shearer, and Damaine Radcliff
Rated PG
One hour, 46 minutes

Grade: B

I'm going to start this review with an admission. I wasn't all that excited about this movie going in. As a sports fan, I've seen nearly every sports movie ever made (discounting the really terrible ones, such as the whole Air Bud milieu, or The Jackie Robinson Story, etc.). I know what happens with sports movies. Main subject begins with a good life. Main subject hits adversity. Main subject overcomes adversity to either win, or learn a lesson as important as winning. This is how most all sports movies work, and that's fine. In a life-art parallel, just like a good basketball team does all the same things as a bad basketball team, but just does them better, a good sports movie does certain things better than a bad one. Very little room for ingenuity or innovation. Or at least, no history of it.

So I say that as a preface to this review. "Glory Road" is not a great sports movie. Most sports movies are not "Great Sports Movies" (I smell a Top 10 coming this week...). "Glory Road" is, however, a good sports movie, and if you like the genre (or the sport of basketball), then it's certainly worth your time. It is an enjoyable film. But it is predictable (and anyone who is thinking right now, "OBVIOUSLY it's predictable, it's based on a true story!, stop reading right now, and go look at some pretty pictures of bunny rabbits. I'm not getting into the argument.) It is exactly how a movie like this plays out. Nothing is done that makes you go, "wow, I've never experienced something like this in a sports movie." Do not enter this film expecting to be blown away by an original piece of work.

But I revert, again, to the basketball team analogy. It does everything most sports movies do pretty well. Part of the problem, though, may lie in the fact that the film has so much trouble trying to find a focus for its story that it doesn't have time to do anything special.

There are two convergent plotlines here. Don Haskins is an idealistic basketball coach, nursed on the sport from a young age. He begins the movie as the coach of a girls youth team, somewhere on the coaching food chain between algae and, well, whatever algae eats. But he is offered a job as the coach of a Division I college team. The catch is that the team is Texas Western, a very small mining college in El Paso with little to no history of success. The catalyst for the picture is Haskins' realization that he will never attract big-name white recruits (at the time the only ones that really mattered), so he goes after good, raw, hungry black kids who would jump at the chance just to get an education and get out of their situation.

And so it begins. He recruits kids from inner cities, all talented players with little to no structure in their games. All of them are black. It is 1966, and black players, though not entirely absent, are not prevalent at all. The 1966 Texas Western Miners are known in the sports history books as the first team to start five black players in the NCAA championship game. The movie is about how they arrived there. An educated and experienced moviegoer will know going in what to expect. Scenes of racial intolerance, scenes of infighting between black and white teammates, and away from the race issue, scenes of team-building, of a tough coach trying to get the best out of his charges, of all of the players' differences being shed for the good of the cause.

Again, it's well done. But what keeps it from getting a better grade from me is that I sat through the whole movie the same way I walked away from the preview, with the thought that I felt I was watching a rehash of the stories like the one in "Remember the Titans." It is a situation where one wishes this movie was made before "Titans," because I feel it is a far superior work, but in light of what "Titans" has already done, that feeling is lessened. However, strong performances from Luke and Lucas make it a credible and enjoyable film, as do the slickly-constructed basketball scenes. Though I think some liberties were taken with the way the game was played, it doesn't feel wholly modern. Perhaps the thing "Road" does best is to capture the feel of a small gym in the 1960s, before basketball was a spectacle, before the game, even at the college level, took a back seat to the show. There were moments when I was able to simply sit back and enjoy the pace and rhythm of both the story and the sports action.

In the end, "Glory Road" is a good sports movie, one that hardcore basketball fans will take to much like football fans took to "Titans" and baseball fans took to "The Rookie." I hesitate to mention Disney's hockey entry, because I'm going to put "Miracle" at or near the top of my all-time favorite sports movies, and I don't think the comparison was fair. "Miracle" gave me shivers. "Glory Road" gave me the inspiration to read Dan Wetzel's book of the same name, hoping I'll be able to get a fuller version of the story.