Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a review of the newest sports underdogs under the direction of a coach with a sharp tongue, but a heart of gold movie, GLORY ROAD. These kind of movies can either work brilliantly (RUDY, HOOSIERS) or fall into the rather large traps of the genre. Vincent Hanna brings us word that GLORY ROAD falls into the latter. Here's the man!
Movies like “Glory Road” are tricky. They strain to push all the right buttons, and your instincts (or maybe it is your conscience) suggests cutting it slack because of the subject matter. It somehow seems unfair to criticize when intentions are noble.
However, something this shamelessly manipulative and formulaic is difficult to digest.
Based on a true story, “Glory Road” is the latest from super-producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who also produced “Remember the Titans” and apparently wants to tackle racism in between making things blow up fantastically.
No time is wasted getting the story going. It is 1965, and Don Haskins (Josh Lucas) is a young high school girl’s basketball coach.
When given the chance to coach Division 1 basketball at Texas Western (now UTEP), he doesn’t care that it’s a football school with no recruiting budget. Or that he has to live in the men’s dorm and baby sit the players. Or that the only time the team draws a crowd is on Taco Night. He just wants to coach Division 1 basketball.
Already it feels like major portions of the story are missing or were cut out. How does Texas Western know about Haskins in the first place? Has he always dreamed of coaching men’s college basketball? Those questions are never bothered with.
Haskins gathers up his wife (Emily Deschanel in a ridiculously thin and thankless devoted wife role) and two small children and heads for El Paso, Texas.
After begging for a few recruitment dollars in order to put a competitive team together, Haskins, along with assistants Moe (“Jarhead’s” Evan Jones) and Ross (Red West), attempts to woo some good players to Texas Western.
Problem is, white athletes have no interest in playing for Texas Western. They want to play for schools like Duke, Kansas and Kentucky.
One day a frustrated Haskins just happens to catch a glimpse of Bobby Joe Hill (Derek Luke) at a summer camp. African-American Hill has to settle for a few scrub minutes at the end of a game, but he makes his basketball skills perfectly clear.
Impressed, Haskins immediately offers him a scholarship. Then he sends Moe to places like Gary, Indiana and the Bronx, New York to recruit more African-American players. The team ends up with seven in all.
Essentially, “Glory Road” is split into two halves. The first half consists of recruiting the players and practicing. We’ve seen it all before. The players are lazy and raw, and the coach has to whip them into shape by making them run and teaching them the fundamentals. Haskins yelling at his players becomes tedious in a hurry.
The second half covers the 1965-66 season. No one expects much out of Texas Western, but Haskins has the team playing hard and they find themselves having an undefeated season, which includes victories over excellent teams like Kansas and Iowa.
It all leads up to an NCAA tournament showdown against legendary Adolph Rupp’s (Jon Voight) Kentucky Wildcats. And for the first time in history, the starting lineup in an NCAA championship game was entirely African-American.
Though the basketball players in “Glory Road” are an appealing group of guys and people naturally enjoy rooting for the underdog, there are too many flaws for the movie to succeed.
For starters, the characters couldn’t possibly be more one-dimensional, beginning with Haskins. His motives have much more to do with winning than making some sort of statement, but that is about all we learn about the man.
Haskins spends nearly the entire movie screaming sports clichés at his players (along with pearls of wisdom like, “I’ll make your dreams come true faster than a twister can take your socks off”). His favorite is “Are you kidding me?”, which he states in a variety of tones at least 50 times. That really is all there is to him. Lucas wears the same disapproving scowl on his face from start to finish and flounders in an extremely underwritten role.
The same goes for the players. No one makes much of an impression because they aren’t given a chance to. Bobby Joe is the star and receives the obligatory love interest, but that is treated as such an afterthought that you wonder why the filmmakers even bothered.
Racism is treated in a perfunctory, after-school special manner. A few rednecks wave Confederate flags and yell epithets, and one player is beaten up, but careful measures are taken to avoid dealing with the issue in any candid or meaningful way. They clearly don’t want to risk offending anyone.
It’s understandable that the filmmakers wanted to make a PG movie appropriate for families, but in doing so they skirt over potentially interesting issues in favor of yet another bus ride group sing-a-long and similarly corny bonding moments that ring completely false.
How did the white players feel about being on that team? What made them not quit? What did the African-American community think about Haskins starting five black players? What did El Paso think?
All of these questions (and plenty more) are either brushed to the side or ignored completely. The decision was made to treat this is a standard David and Goliath tale, and nothing more. It panders to the viewer and follows the sports movie playbook to a T. At least it does something well.
(If you’re a sports fan, don’t go expecting to see exciting basketball scenes. They are as routine and stale as the rest of the movie, and nothing you haven’t seen before.)
