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Film review

More full-court press, please

Glory Road tells a great story - of the first college basketball team to win a championship with an all-black lineup - but makes it look too easy.

By STEVE PERSALL
Published January 12, 2006

[Disney]

In Glory Road, coach Don Haskins, played by Josh Lucas, breaks barriers and leads his team to victory.

Basketball coach Don Haskins preaches fundamentals throughout Glory Road, urging his players to avoid flashy athleticism and focus on basic, comparatively dull moves. James Gartner's movie works the same way.

Glory Road is essentially Remember the Titans with a differently shaped ball. Both films deal with sports teams breaking color barriers during the civil rights era. Both stories deserve to be told. But the inspiring tale of Texas Western University's 1966 national championship team - the first ever with an all-black lineup - deserves something a bit more adventurous than Gartner manages.

Josh Lucas (Stealth, Sweet Home Alabama) plays Haskins, a former girls basketball coach plucked from obscurity to lead an even more obscure college basketball program. Recruiting players to the parched plains of El Paso is tough, so Haskins reaches out to inner-city areas. Seven black players take Haskins' scholarship offers while white students, administrators and boosters raise their eyebrows.

Texas Western's accomplishment is sports legend, which is good for everything except a movie, since there's no doubt about the outcome. The racist reactions of opposing fans and coaches aren't surprising. The players' resilience, their quietly prideful rebellion against expectations, is never in question. Glory Road is like watching a vintage game on ESPN Classic, an exercise in familiarity reminding viewers of how the game changed.

Lucas is passable as Haskins, although his image as a poor man's Matthew McConaughey won't be changed by the performance. The movie's best attributes are the largely unknown actors playing the players. Derek Luke (Antwone Fisher) is easily recognized, playing point guard Bobby Joe Hill, whose skills made him a Texas legend. The rest of the roster comprises solid, if unspectacular performers.

Name a sports cliche and it's in Gartner's game plan. Think of the ways racism rears its ugly head and there's some derivation here. Yet the enlightenment Texas Western's team brought to college basketball - and American society by extension - seems too pat, much easier than real life must have been. This is the Disney version of intolerance, never offensive and always tilted toward modern sensibilities about racial harmony. The whole game, so to speak, feels fixed.

There are undeniably amusing moments, especially during recruiting season and the players' introduction to an alien environment. When the season begins, victories pile up with economical ease; even the team's lone loss doesn't seem as difficult to accept as it must have been. Glory Road seldom manages to seem as special as its subjects.

But as far as feel-good sports movies go, it's everything audiences have shown a willingness to embrace. Go ahead, cheer the good guys and hiss the villains; Jon Voight's hammy, prosthetic-laden role as University of Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp makes the latter easy. Hope for the best for these engaging players and their spunky coach. Ignore that suspicion that everything must turn out okay or else there wouldn't be a movie. If you can find the fun in fundamentals, Glory Road is an easy layup.

Grade: B-

Director: James Gartner

Cast: Josh Lucas, Derek Luke, Red West, Schin A.S. Kerr, Mehcad Brooks, Alphonso McAuley, Emily Deschanel, Jon Voight, Tatyana Ali, Damaine Radcliffe, Al Shearer, Sam Jones III, James Olivard, Evan Jones

Screenplay: Chris Cleveland, Gregory Allen Howard

Rating: PG; racial violence and epithets, brief profanity

Running time: 106 min.

[Last modified January 11, 2006, 10:48:18]