Glory Road Review
by Steve Rhodes (Steve DOT Rhodes AT InternetReviews DOT com)January 11th, 2006
GLORY ROAD
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2006 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): **
GLORY ROAD, by first-time director James Gartner, is one disappointing basketball film, since it takes a great, true story and turns it into a very mediocre movie. Never deciding if it wants to highlight sports action or racial injustice, it ends up being a milquetoast version of each. From HOOSIERS to REMEMBER THE TITANS to FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS, we have come, rightly, to expect movies about sports teams to be lucid and compelling, but GLORY ROAD is neither.
Although its heavily clichéd script probably meant the movie was hopeless, it is in the editing room where the movie was completely destroyed. We watch games in little snippets of action, with quick shots filmed up close so that it's never quite clear who is doing what and when. And the editor is obviously more interested in the reaction shots of the coaches and the fans than he is in the players on the court. All of the tension and excitement is drained from most of the games so that more time can be devoted to the back stories, which are staged clumsily and unconvincingly. In fact, the movie wastes the first 45 minutes of its screen time with pretty standard basketball practices followed by the traditional after-hours carousing around the local bars by the players who are breaking training.
The story starts as Coach Don Haskins, the coach of a high school girl's basketball team in 1965, is recruited to be the new coach of Texas Western University. The school has no funding, even for recruiting, but it is at least a Division I school, so it gets to compete against all of the big schools that matter.
After the editing mistakes, the second biggest problem in the film is the casting of the key role of Coach Haskins, who is on-screen for most of the movie. SWEET HOME ALABAMA's easygoing romantic lead, Josh Lucas, plays the coach. Never believable, Lucas's Haskins doesn't yell at his team from the sidelines. Oh no, he talks to them in a voice so low and polite that it would never, ever be heard in the real noise of a basketball gym. (Ben Affleck was originally cast in the role, so I guess it could have been worse.) In contrast, Jon Voight delivers a tough, credible and memorable piece of acting as Coach Adolph Rupp, the coach of the legendary University of Kentucky team that Texas Western faces in the movie's big, final game.
The script makes the mistake of not focusing on any of the players but gives each one of them just enough time to get the audience mildly interested without any emotional payoffs.
Although Coach Haskins took a losing team and recruited enough new players to turn it into an upset winner, what is unique about this team is that seven of the twelve players were black. At that time, not a single black played Division I basketball in the South, but this coach recruited seven of them to play on his team, much to the consternation of the racists wherever they played. (Still, it is interesting to note that the only coach who makes an overtly racist act in the movie is Haskins, when he tells his star white players that they will not be able to play for even a second as subs in the final game. He will only let the black players play, even though many of the whites had been instrumental in the team's success up until then.)
There are many incidents of racial harassment against the blacks by rival fans, but the movie keeps downplaying it by cutting away quickly and not letting the players demonstrate much rage or anger.
Sometime this story will be retold in a much better movie. I look forward to seeing it.
GLORY ROAD runs 1:46. It is rated PG for "racial issues including violence and epithets, and momentary language" and would be acceptable for kids around 9 and up.
The film opens nationwide in the United States on Friday, January 13, 2006. In the Silicon Valley, it will be showing at the AMC theaters, the Century theaters and the Camera Cinemas.
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Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
