Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...

The problem with sports films, especially true-life ones, is that we all know there’s little or no reason to make a “based on a true story” movie that has an unhappy ending. These movies are feel-good movies. You watch them to see people doing the best they are capable of. Maybe you watch because it’s inspirational, or because you’ve been there and you want to relive it in some way, or maybe you just watch because you like the cheap emotional rush these films provide if they’re even halfway competent.

GLORY ROAD, as it turns out, is more than halfway competent. In fact, I know a lot of people really liked REMEMBER THE TITANS, but for my money, this is the better of the two films. The reason I thought GLORY ROAD worked is because it’s got a sense of humor, and because it doesn’t seem like it’s trying to misdirect you on its way to the inevitable victory at the end. This film is less about whether they’re going to win or not, and more about how these young men dealt with becoming a team at a time when integration was hardly the order of the day.

I was also surprised to see Josh Lucas turn in such a strong, likeable lead performance. So far, he’s been one of those guys with a lot of buzz and not much juice to back it up. Yes, he’s a good-looking guy, and yes, he’s got spooky blue Paul Newman eyes. But that’s not enough for stardom, and up till now, I haven’t been sure what it is that people see in him. Here, he exudes a charm that is pretty persuasive and natural, and he comes across as the thinking man’s answer to Matthew McConaughey. What I really like about Lucas in the film is that he seems like a man, not an overgrown boy, a quality that many of his peers never seem to master. The young cast playing the basketball players that Lucas recruits for his team are all pretty good, and there’s an easy chemistry between them that sells the story even when the script fails.

And don’t get me wrong... I’m not promising you some revelatory work of art that reinvents the genre. GLORY ROAD certainly isn’t that. But it is a solid sports movie that does the most important thing any film like this can do: it makes you care. In particular, I loved the closing credits, with the real faces who show up to talk about the story. Pat Riley talks about one of the pivotal moments in the game in which one of the Texas Western players dunked right over Riley’s head, something that the movie gets just right, and which makes me laugh. Riley seems really good-natured about it, which just makes me like him more.

The disc comes with a number of extra features, with an emphasis on the true story. There’s a lot of documentary footage of Coach Don Haskins and his techniques, and there are three separate documentaries here about him. There are two commentaries, one with director James Gartner and producer Jerry Bruckheimer, and the other with writers Chris Cleveland and Bettina Gilois. There are some deleted scenes and a music video, too. The film looks and sounds very good, with an anamorphic transfer that nicely reproduces the full 2.35:1 image.

MOVIE: Rent it

DISC CONTENT: Moderate

DISC QUALITY: Very nice