Glory Road: Critic Reviews

An absorbing film.

Remember the Titans? Forget about them! Here's a new Jerry Bruckheimer production that places its secular faith in an almighty audience appetite for underdogs, sports, and dramas in which wrongs are righted by good-looking Americans.

This season's obligatory inspirational coach-centered sports movie finds its true story at a point where sports history intersects with the struggle for racial equality.

An appealing Disney sports movie that underplays its potential, Glory Road is at least a more satisfying basketball saga than last year's Coach Carter.

It's one helluva story, and if this moving, and even thrilling little movie finally brings Haskins and a truly great American sports story to light, then three cheers and hooray.

Is it time already for another based-on-a-true-story feel-good Disney sports drama? Didn't that golf movie, The Greatest Game Ever Played, just come out?

The team's accomplishments are here diluted into fodder for another of the producer's feel-good man-weepies.

Glory Road is a pure Hollywood fantasy. As movie fiction, however, I guess it is entertaining enough.

It's a well-trod path, this 'via de basketball,' but Glory Road makes it worth the trip.

A well-meaning movie that slides downhill like a runaway ball of cheese.

While Bruckheimer and Co. stretch the gospel theme too far and leave no emotional waypoint unmarked, Glory Road largely works.

Where it succeeds is as the story of a chapter in history, the story of how one coach at one school arrived at an obvious conclusion and acted on it, and helped open college sports in the South to generations of African Americans.

Glory Road, a stand-up-and-cheer basketball tale taken from real life, is a drama that, almost inevitably, falls short of its subject. But what a subject!

First-time director James Gartner observes all the rituals--the coach busting chops, the team sneaking out to party--but the players are indifferently characterized and the civil rights story has a fake Black History Month feel.

Viewed as a re-creation of a watershed moment, Glory Road is sturdy, efficient, perhaps even worthy. Taken as cinema, however, it falls far short of inspiring.

That core audience should be generally pleased with Glory Road, a college basketball story as predictable as North Carolina's old four-corner offense.

Glory Road is a can't-lose slam dunk of a movie, the sort of film that charges right over its minor flaws thanks to good intentions, fine execution and a breathless air of excitement.

By knocking the edges off Glory Road, Bruckheimer has turned a raw, compelling story into bland pudding.

A slick enterprise buoyed by a Motown-flavored '60s soundtrack and an appealing ensemble cast.

As Coach Haskins would say, it wins because it sticks to the fundamentals.

When a movie this corny still inspires, 'feel good' feels just right. Stay through the credits, when the 'real' coach and players talk, and you'll see the real Glory in this tale.

Lacking the gritty reality of the 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams, this Jerry Bruckheimer film, directed by newcomer James Gartner, converts a year in the life of a basketball team into a very conventional triumph of the underdogs.

If the facts of the story are essentially true, their presentation is as formulaic as ever.

Sometimes it takes a sports movie to remind us how far we've come as a country -- and to marvel at how we got here at all, in our awkward combination of leaps and baby steps.

Glory Road's strength is the way in which it blends social awareness into the sports genre.