The Express: Critic Reviews

Has Dennis Quaid really never played a college football coach before? With his handsome, craggy face and likable intensity, he was born for the job.

Packages a real-life story of athletic triumph and social progress into an accessible, rousing melodrama that is no less potent for being almost entirely predictable.

Gary Fleder's sporting drama has its heart in the right place but, sheesh, that title grows more ironic with each crawling minute.

Despite appealing performances and kinetic football scenes, the storytelling is mostly conventional, except for two outstanding set pieces.

The Express finesses a cinematic hat trick: It's entertaining, deeply moving and genuinely important.

Aside from managing to get made at all, the movie doesn't do Davis's legacy any favors by giving us the store-brand version of his life.

Based on a Davis biography, Gary Fleder's account is a noble attempt at humanizing the myth, but it succumbs to the worst sorts of sports-movie cliches.

Sadly, however, this is all too familiar, which is something nobody could say about the real Ernie Davis.

The Express plays for our sympathy -- and wins.

Davis is played winningly, without a single false note, by Rob Brown. His coach, the irascible but decent Ben Schwartzwalder, is brought home beautifully by Dennis Quaid, who has quietly become one of America's finest actors.

The Express delivers visceral gridiron energy. Fleder and his crew capture the moments so many athletes refer to as 'being in the zone.'

The Express is involving and inspiring in the way a good movie about sports almost always is.

The film does the job, in its conventional way. But it's geared to throw the prime screen time in the direction of the guy playing the guy coaching the guy who's supposed to be running the movie.

Director Gary Fleder does an end run around the genre's cliches, and cinematographer Kramer Morgenthau plays with desaturated color and highlights for a rich period feel.

The Express eventually reaches its triumph-of-the-human-spirit climax, but it yanks too hard on the heart strings during the long journey there.

The Express is a somewhat ordinary movie about an extraordinary life.

The Express tells the true story of college-football star Ernie Davis. It's such a naturally compelling tale that one wonders why it hasn't been filmed before.

Rob Brown's performance in the title role is solid and static, but Dennis Quaid's portrayal of coach Ben Schwartzwalder provides a convincing metaphor for a nation going through a crisis of conscience.

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.

Davis deserves to be remembered, but as professionally crafted as The Express is, the movie is an almost instantly forgettable version of his life.

Consider that a virtue in a movie content to teach familiar messages without overstating them.

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While Ernie's on-field accomplishments were extraordinary, it was the environment in which he struggled to achieve them that makes him the worthy subject of a motion picture.

Dennis Quaid scores an emotional touchdown in this sturdy, factual football drama.

At times stirring, inspiring and thoughtful.