Remember the Titans: Critic Reviews

Toss it in the bin along with The Replacements, but give it bonus points, at least, for having a social conscience.

The leads, Denzel Washington and particularly Will Patton, are so good they occasionally make you forget the material is shameless.

The result is the sort of deeply massaged truth that isn't stranger than fiction -- it's worse than fiction.

Maybe it's all true. But one is always a little discomfited when life, or a movie, imitates weary melodramatic patterns this slavishly.

When the hard battle for integration is served up as a feel-good package, we've all been bamboozled.

Inspiring football drama brings history to life.

The crack-of-dawn jog to Gettysburg is the only hokey Hail Mary in an otherwise smart, stirring sports film. Consider "Titans" a PG-rated, kindhearted drill for the brutal sadism that would win Denzel Washington an Oscar for "Training Day."

The absence of innovation can easily be forgiven.

The film is quite lightweight for the subject matter, but Washington and company make it watchable.

Although there's enough emotional manipulation here to fill a river with tears, it's hard not to be swept up...

Yakin's hackwork is so slickly manipulative and preachy it has the tone of a politician's TV commercial...

Unless you find the idea of such an earnest, well-meaning mixture of rah-rah sports action, social commentary and maudlin tearjerker off-putting from the start, you'll find that this example is professionally crafted and perhaps even momentarily stirring.

The emphasis on the players' developing mutual trust, is absorbing to watch and cleanly directed.

The film tries its best not to point fingers and avoids the strawmen racists that are so easily shown in other movies.

One of the most entertaining films of the year.

... a highly manipulative, utterly predictable and greatly entertaining film

...impossible to resist.

The best performance here, though, is by Will Patton who infuses his Coach Yoast with the humanity that's strangely missing from Washington's Coach Boone.

Will someone please make me a great football movie?

Remember The Titans won't win any Oscars and it won't explain the rules of American football but the glow will last the whole way home.

A moving story with nice work from young actors Wood Harris and Ryan Hurst, among others, as the young men forced to see beyond skin color.

Is perfecting the art of middle-of-the-road really what should be applauded in movie making today?

We've seen this kind of sports movie a thousand times, but you know what, I like that movie.

This film has an important message, well told.

A sprawling, muscular gridiron movie that, surprisingly enough, doesn't have all that much to do with football.