The Express

It's a shame that this film went to such trouble to get details like uniforms and campus settings accurate and then played so loosely with the facts. A prime example is when the 1959 Syracuse team won the national championship by defeating Texas in the Cotton Bowl, an event portrayed as if the Orange had never experienced such a rabid segregationist setting. In fact, they had played in the same Cotton Bowl three years earlier, losing to TCU 28-27. And for that game they had Jim Brown, an African-American, on the team so the problems they encountered (segregated hotels etc.) would not have been unexpected nor unprepared for. The actual game is totally mixed up, that is to say the first SU TD was the 87-yard Schwedes to Davis pass, not the last, as shown. And, as Schwartzwalder was always quick to point out, Texas was never within fewer than two scores of overtaking the Orange -- not as close as 15-14 as shown in the film. One could go on and on, but to someone unfamiliar with the facts, it is an inspiring story that should complement other films about the civil rights era.

Enjoyed the movie but for purist there were many factual inaccuracies. Syracuse did not play Boston College in 1959. The West Virginia game in which WV and their fans are portrayed as very racist was played in Syracuse not Morganton. In the Texas game of that year the score was never 15-14. There are others but that suffices. When a description is "based" on a true story it means not everything is necessarily true. Remember that as one videographer told me, "we are artists and entertainers and not historians!"

When studios turn back the clock in movies, they expose the excessive baggage which accompanied our bigoted and ignorant past. Audiences living in the present decade can observe all of the social ills of those bygone eras. Social problems in America have all but been buried, yet irritatingly they surface when our society is reminded not every American has learned the lessons of the past. Thus it is with this superior movie called " The Express." The great Ernie Davis is played by Rob Brown as an adult and Justin Martin in his youth. Both actors do a incredible job. Dennis Quaid plays Ben Schwartzwalder, the inspirational coach who does an exceptional job. The icon Jim Brown is played by Darren Henson and Charles Dutton is William Davis Sr. Although the film traces the life of Ernie Davis, it only highlights the major events, tragedies and triumphs of the all star player at Saracues University. The movie is inspirational on many levels and touches the viewer with the most dramatic obstacles such as racism and segregation. Indeed a personal meeting with the late great John F. Kennedy is sure to evoke positive memories. Throughout the entire movie one is offered a blunt eye-view of our most brutal social affliction and one can only hope our great nation will one day make it obsolete. Easilly recommended to all audiences. ****

Loosely based on the life of the first black football player to win the Heisman Trophy, this follows a chap named Ernie Davis -- a name most viewers are unlikely to be familiar with -- throughout his school years. When he reaches Syracuse College, he finds he is one of two black players on his team. His coach is played by Dennis Quaid. The period was just far enough back in time that there were very few black football players, and in some states, blacks could not stay in the same hotels or attend social functions with whites. All of this is dealt with in a forthright manner, although some facts have been slightly altered to punch home the drama of the era. Quaid's coach is a gruff old man with a heart of gold, a role Quaid likely will be playing more and more often as he ages. You may not recognize many of the actors in this, but they are uniformly excellent. Worth a watch, even if you dislike football.

Sending off the film in a monologue which encapsulates his entire story, lead character Ernie Davis (Rob Brown) concedes to the fact that he doesn't quite know how to end his story; it's a desirable lack of focus for a man who doesn't necessarily want to tell a structurally sound story, but a powerful and important message about his struggle instead. Yet this sometimes off balanced narrative unwittingly carries through onto this, the big screen adaptation of young Ernie Davis' story, and the movie as a result is worse off, no matter how faithful it may adhere to the source material which borrows largely from the main character's real life biography. The Express for all intents and purposes retains the important elements of Davis' short but inspiring tale, backing up the movie's hard hitting themes with solid heart, soul and passion; yet lumbered with a force-fed implementation that sacrifices the stories emotional integrity for mawkish melodrama, the feature too often looses its footing when it really counts. Nevertheless, with some fitting performances, stark photography and an endlessly inspiring story of unity, social injustice and change, The Express still manages to overcome its weaker moments to make a greater whole.

Told through the eyes of up and coming black American football sensation Ernie Davis, The Express delivers a two punch game that fights on two fields which turn out to be one in the same. Ostensibly the feature is about Ernie's battle to the top of the game back in its earliest days when to be black was looked upon as something of a weakness or automatic disqualification from being taken seriously. On this purely face value level, the movie does well; it has the building structure and bubbling tension needed to create the necessary highs and lows of a typical, engrossing sports movie. Watching Ernie is like watching a legend, and that's exactly what it should be like. Sure enough the man is more or less untouchable in the movie's first two thirds, but showing his weaknesses on field would be superfluous at best. Instead the script leaves much of Davis' conflict and hardship to be faced off the pitch, even when he's playing on it. At its heart, The Express is a moral tale of people coming together and letting parts of themselves go that maybe they hadn't thought through quite thoroughly enough; at its core, The Express is about racial discrimination. Counterbalancing the much more visceral aspects of the feature with this emotive, heart felt drama; the movie achieves both a sense of wonder and relevancy that still rings true to this day.

Despite the script's well intentioned spirit however, all does not go well when it is finally given transition to the big screen. Director Gary Fleder and composer Mark Isham too often inject the feature with an overbearing, sometimes sickening level of sugar coated melodrama. From the sweeping strings of Isham's sentimentally ridden compositions to Fleder's insistence on emphasising start contrasts between the stories dark and light moments, The Express sometimes boils down to mere caricature that belittles the ideas that the script is trying to get across. Thankfully though, all is not lost in either of their abilities; Isham does far better when scoring for the movie's faster moving segments and Fleder gets some hard hitting and poignant performances out of his main cast. The movie's central performances from Rob Brown and Dennis Quaid are nothing of any remarkable significance, but they serve their purposes well and do justice to the characters that they are playing; sure enough Quaid can be his withdrawn, wooden self from time to time, but his presence is a fine mixture of warm and cold, enough to make the relationship between the two main characters compelling to watch develop.

As engrossing as this can all be though, it's oft hard to swallow some of what the movie tries so hard to press upon you; it's a film that tries to raise questions whilst simultaneously answering without being too cynical, and for the most part, does that well enough, even if it is all a little too dependant on sucrose for its own good. So while watching The Express can feel a little like getting force-fed an over-sized, over-iced and over-baked cake to chow down on for two hours, the end result is at least in itself, satisfying. Telling a story of perseverance against the most uncomfortable of challenges whilst at the same time incorporating themes of friendship, family and even a little football into the mix, The Express is a movie that is more about the substance beneath rather than the sometimes troublesome crust that encompasses. It takes a long time to get there, and arguably ends far too late, but for anyone looking for an uplifting and inspiring tale of one man changing the course of history forever, then The Express should do well enough.

• A review by Jamie Robert Ward (http://www.invocus.net)