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Review: “The Express”
By kyle | October 9, 2008
Scores a Few Points
2.5 stars out of 4
Running time: 130 minutes
Rated PG (profanity, racism, brief sensuality)
Kyle Smith review of “The Express”
“The Express” is a decent football movie, just about good enough to be the 40th best episode of “Friday Night Lights.”
Which has aired 39 episodes.
Rob Brown, a likeable if bland actor with an eager apple-pie face, plays Ernie Davis, who shook off poverty and racism to follow in Jim Brown’s urgent footsteps in the Syracuse University football program in 1959.
Thanks to the gruff-but-fair-ness of his only mildly racist coach (Dennis Quaid, borrowing Kevin Costner’s look from “JFK”), Davis took the team and his own career to places where even Brown, whose number he wore, had not gone.
Lots of uplifty music and isn’t-this-dramatic camera work (half the games seem to take place in either total darkness or stabbing rains) take things exactly where you expect them to go, until a surprisingly effective and emotional climax. If you’ve only got one really good act, save it for the third.
Otherwise this is a zero-surprise story, strictly warm milk for the soul. As a youngster being raised by his loving grandfather (Charles Dutton), Ernie marvels at the sight of Jackie Robinson playing baseball on TV, and just to make sure we get the point Ernie’s reflected face gets superimposed over Robinson’s. During his rise, Ernie says things like, “I wasn’t running from, I was running to” (though it sure looks like he’s running from racists) and “I know my place, gentlemen, it just may not be where you like it.”
Early on, we learn that Syracuse has never won a national championship, and that no black man has ever won the Heisman Trophy. (It’s sort of like when your girlfriend tells you she’s never been to Cancun for her birthday and never gotten a Louis Vuitton clutch for Christmas.)
The football scenes don’t burst out so much as unfurl, majestically. Ernie gets the ball, we go to slo-o-o-o motion, defenders flail, the goal line awaits. Next game, same thing. Pass play? Slo-o-o—o mo on the quarterback. The sna-a-a-ap. Ernie da-a-a-ashing free. The ba-a-a-a-all in the a-a—a-air. The coaches on the sidelines, the fans watching on TV, the quarterback again, the receiver again, the prayers of a nation, the making of history, the critic going out for a Coke and back just in time to see the touchdown. Nearly two hours in, we still (apparently) need to be told that Ernie wanted to be “the best player I could be, period.” “If you practice half-assed, you will play half-assed,” says the coach. This movie must have practiced half-assed.
It’s easy to applaud Ernie’s gridiron genius, even when it stretches credulity (let’s see, did he really get falsely accused of fumbling by a racist referee, intercept a pass and catch an 87-yarder—on consecutive plays? No.). But the movie might be a bit more interesting if Davis had more to him than simply graceful gumption and victimhood, and if the spaces around him could be filled with something. His girlfriend, for instance, gets about half a dozen lines and seems not to have been issued any discernible personality.
At times the film even seems to bore itself. With injunctions like, “Don’t you let anyone steal history away from you” and a question being nudgingly phrased, “In light of what’s going on in this country, do you feel added pressure to represent change?” “The Express” hints that it wishes it were about someone else.
October 9th, 2008 at 7:36 pm
The Ernie Davis character’s lack of complexity really hurts the movie. Quaid’s character, not the star attraction, is far more intriguing - and complex.
October 9th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
Wow. I hope they make more “first black” movies since Hollywood hasn’t beaten that horse to death yet, I hope you can sense my dripping sarcasm. If they want to make an interesting sports movie about someone who had to deal with discrimination they need to make the Jim Thorpe story. He was a much deeper and more complex character even in death.
October 9th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Movies about Ameican football are popular because unlike the game itself, they do not stop every thirty seconds for a beer commercial. Instead, the movies themselves are always one long beer commercial, and rightly so, for nobody in their right mind would ever want to watch one sober. In the history of Hollywood there has been one good football picture, “North Dallas 40.”
October 9th, 2008 at 11:45 pm
Aw come one Hunter, no love for Rudy?! Where’s your heart at?