The Express
why do bio-pics have to be so earnest?
2008-10-09
By Sergio Mims

CAST:  Rob Brown, Dennis Quaid, Omar Benson Miller, Darrin DeWitt Henson, Charles S. Dutton
WRITTEN BY: Charles Levitt
DIRECTED BY:  Gary Fleder

**1/2  Two and half stars

The fact of the matter is that once you’ve seen one inspirational sports bio-pic, you have basically seen them all. That, without question, is the case with the new sports bio-pic film, The Express.

No doubt a sure fire crowd pleaser, The Express is totally predictable without a single surprise or unusual twist from the first scene to the last tear jerking final moments. No doubt audiences like predictability in their entertainment since risk taking and unconventionality are very scary things to digest, but The Express takes predictability to the extreme that it almost runs on auto pilot, flirting intensely with becoming souless in feeling and tone.

The film tells the story (with a good deal of creative license) of Ernie Davis (nicely, if somewhat stoically, played by Rob Brown)  the legendary running back for Syracuse University in New York in the late 50’s and early 60’s who became the first black football player to be awarded the Heisman Trophy in 1962, shortly before his extraordinary
career came to a tragic end. The film traces Davis’ hard scrabble childhood when he was raised by his worshipped grandfather (Dutton) in Pennsylvania (and later in Elmira, New York after his widowed mother’s remarriage) through his college years after he catches the eye of legendary Syracuse University football coach Schwartwalder (wonderfully played by a gruff Dennis Quaid).

In due course Davis, through his talent and basic decency, wins over his reluctant, bigoted coach (still scarred from his experience with his previous star, NFL great Jim Brown) and everyone else while encountering racism and other obstacles that would have felled a lesser man.

Surprisingly, given that the film centers on Davis, we learn relatively little about him except that he was without any flaws and was a really really nice guy, so saint like, one can almost see the halo above his head whenever he appears on screen. Coupled with that is the fact that the film is weighted down with some very hoary clichés heard in literally every football movie such as “I do my talking out on the field” and “Football is a religion.”

Director Gary Fleder, no doubt aware of the script’s shortcomings, makes The Express a visual tour de force with every cinematic trick one can conjure up. Solidly made and quite inventively directed, the film is over loaded with dolly shots, swooping crane shots, rack focus shots, freeze frames, inter cutting scratchy black and white 8mm home movie footage, and plenty more visual razzle dazzle making the film endlessly fascinating from a visual overload point of view.

But perhaps the most amazing aspect of The Express is the film’s achievement of turning the notoriously recalcitrant Jim Brown (played by Darrin DeWitt Henson who looks remarkably like a young Dennis Haysbert) Davis’ mentor and Syracuse University’s great football star before Davis, into a  nice guy.

We’re talking Jim Brown, the hard core hand of strength, a man who has led an extraordinary and controversial life. In an age where black men in the media, and in a real life, have become increasingly soft and sissified, Jim Brown was and still is the absolute definition of real black masculinity. If there is anyone who deserves a film about his life, it is Jim Brown.

The Express doesn’t transcend or reinvent the genre of sport pictures. It is, instead a slick, professionally made movie that plays it safe and obvious. For many people that may be enough to recommended it.

Film critic, lecturer and festival consultant Sergio Mims covers all things film from the city that works, Chicago. He is a regular contributor to ebonyjet.com