The Express

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

The Civil Rights sports movie has become in recent years a tradition almost as common as the sports movie itself. Racism adds a powerful thematic element to the teamwork-oriented, against-all-odds format of the sports movie, and as soon as Hollywood figured that out we were given Remember the Titans, Glory Road, and their kin. We can now add to that list The Express, an energetic and well-made movie about Ernie Davis, the first African-American to win the Heisman trophy.

But wait a minute. The Express tweaks the formula enough that I'm tempted to say it's more of a biopic than a sports movie; yes, there's plenty of coaching speeches and big plays, but the film structurally follows Davis from a young boy to a grown man, and even after the Big Game -- a national championship between Davis and his Syracuse University team and the all-white University of Texas -- there's still twenty minutes of movie left.

We start with Davis as a young boy in Pennsylvania, living with his grandfather (Charles S. Dutton); he later moves to Elmira, New York to live with his mother, and it's there, while playing high school football, that he catches the eyes of a number of college coaches, notably Syracuse University's Ben Schwartzwalder (Dennis Quaid).

Swartzwalder doesn't seem to care much about race personally. But it's 1957, and he doesn't want to rock the boat if he doesn't have to, especially after spending a few long years butting heads with Jim Brown (Darrin Dewitt Henson), his star African-American player who was recently passed over for the Heisman trophy (unfairly, the movie asserts). He's not an idiot, though: when he sees how well Davis can play, he courts him to play at Syracuse aggressively.

Despite the film's focus on Davis over the entire team, The Express is a very conventional movie, complete with a rousing (almost too loud) score by Mark Isham, top-notch production values, and a complete lack of subtlety with its sports metaphors. "When you get on the field, you'll be up against a lot more than just the other team," Brown warns Davis during his recruitment. Points like that are pounded into our skulls a few more times than they need to be.

There are quieter moments. After Davis joins Syracuse, the relationship between him and an initially racist white teammate played by Geoff Stults is well-handled, and his friendship with fellow black teammate Jack Buckley (Omar Benson Miller, recently seen in Miracle at St. Anna) provides some much-appreciated lighter moments. The final minutes of the film turn what could have been played as melodrama or tragedy instead into low-key, thoughtful optimism.

The central relationship of the film is of course between Davis and Coach Schwartzwalder. This was no doubt partly a business decision (the movie's light on star power, so let's beef up the coach's role and attract a big name), and it veers into a familiar dynamic (the black ...