The Blind Side: Critic Reviews

What The Blind Side offers is a kind of liberal Hollywood version of conservative values: all rock-solid valor, all the time.

A movie made up almost entirely of turning points and yet curiously devoid of drama or suspense.

A Photoshopped image of reality that is bland, parochial, and stereotypically acted by a cast who have nothing like the subtlety and range of Trey Parker's puppets from Team America: World Police.

Its superficiality keeps it from being the moving story it could have been.

While it's possible to be enormously entertained and moved by The Blind Side, it's also possible to harbor a twinge of misgiving.

Ohera(TM)s life is meant to make us feel good, and it mostly does. But how good we feel about his story is proportional to how blind wea(TM)re willing to be about how ita(TM)s told.

In every scene, Oher is instructed, lectured, comforted, or petted like a big puppy; he is merely a cipher.

Writer-director John Lee Hancock has turned Oher's remarkable life into a Hollywood fable that trades difficult truths for easy cliches.

Upon seeing [Bullock's] Oscar-worthy performance is "finally!" followed quickly by, "Why the heck did it take so long?"

We never learn why Leigh Anne is so fearless, but Bullock is the force here. McGraw is an amiable anchor to her bull-by-the-horns portrayal.

'The Blind Side' may not make the All-American sports movies team, but it plays with plenty of heart.

The Blind Side fumbles a remarkable, true story of an African-American product of the West Memphis projects who ended up at a Christian school and in the care of a wealthy white family, and then went on to professional football glory.

However obvious, The Blind Side is touching -- despite its habit of dropping major character notes into the melody without warning.

Watching The Blind Side, I felt my emotions being stage-managed, but once or twice I got something in my eye.

It's a cute, touchy-feely crowd pleaser that wants nothing more than to wrap audiences in a warm holiday embrace. In a sense, it achieves that goal, but it is overly sentimental in a Lifetime movie kind-of-way.

Another uplifting and entertaining feel-good, fact-based sports drama.

What makes The Blind Side a Thanksgiving treat is director Hancock's subtle touch and admirable refusal to yield to sports movie cliches, something he did previously with The Rookie and Remember the Titans.

The movie's a pretty conventional feel-good sports drama in many ways. But Bullock and Aaron give it heart that transcends the genre.

The movie glosses over the deeper issues of the tale, ones dealing with race, poverty, privilege and ethics, opting for the feel-good quick hit that makes the overall experience unsatisfying.

What a drag that, one year into Obama's presidency, American films remain so careful about depicting black actors.

The problem with a story that's almost too good to be true is that someone in Hollywood will try to make it better.

Some will doubtlessly dismiss The Blind Side as another example of a heroic white person saving a black victim but, although there is an element of truth in that perfunctory description, it misses the point.

Missed opportunities and surface gestures aside, Hancock draws affable, energetic performances from all concerned.

Writer-director John Lee Hancock wisely lets the true story of Michael Oher speak for itself.