Rated: PG
Running Time: 121 Minutes
Year: 2008
Nudity: None
One Sentence: It's a sports/civil rights movie.
I don't really watch many sports on TV, I am not a football fan, and do not follow much, so it is a little weird I think that I like sports movies. Well I like sports movies if they are good. There have been a few that I just didn't like. The criteria for a good sports movie I think is pretty easy. It has to be shot well, and what I mean by that is, show the sports action in a clear easy to see way. Maintain a good amount of the actual game in the movie, and try to make the action as accurate as possible. Everything else around the movie, has to be good as well, but these are things that I look for most in a sports movie. The Express has this.
The Express deals with a up and coming black college football player during the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement in America. The movie deals with race, racisim and hate as much as it deals with football. This combination sounds like a lot to handle in a movie, but only at the very end did I feel like the movie might of gone on too long, and not because of any of those topics. The Express I think delivered the right balance of everything that was going on at the time to make the movie make sense, and not feel like we were being beaten over the head with any of it. It told a good story and told it well, and only when they got past his college years, did I think the movie drug on a little too long.
Dennis Quaid did an all right job, as the head coach of Saracuse, nothing super special here, but nothing to complain about either. For all you Austin people there is a cotton bowl game with The Texas Longhorns that got a few people in the audience to clap and cheer. The movie gets tense and tight in the sports scenes and makes you sit on your seat and wonder what is going to happen next. The movie delivers what I think it should and does it all in a nice PG package that I think kids can handle if you want to explain race issues to them. So I say this is a renter at least, and I enojyed it, so check it out.
