The Blind Side isn’t alienating because it’s a movie about an insulated conservative family — it’s alienating because it so tediously chirps their Bush-era conservative values. Director John Lee Hancock sticks close to the real-life tale of Michael Oher, a current NFL player who rose to big-league stardom after being adopted by the fast-food-tycoon parents of a girl from his Christian high school. But though Oher’s story may be true, the movie's representation of it is sapped of realism. The Blind Side feels perilous like a good-vs.-evil saga in which Christian values, or the film’s Red-State vision of them, triumph over the degeneration of the poor (mostly black) projects. It also feels like a feature-length advertisement for Taco Bell.

Sandra Bullock trades her usual slapstick for a passable Southern accent as family matriarch Leigh Anne Tuohy. But while she might get a laugh with lines such as “I’m in a prayer group with the DA,” the material is couched so firmly in the film’s overall Jesus-praisin’ righteousness that
Bullock becomes a sort of Southern Sarah Palin. As Tuohy, Bullocks’ Republican aphorisms swamp the characters around her; Oher (Quinton Aaron) may be the star on the football field, but his story is all but benched in this narrative. Aaron gives an adequate performance as the taciturn teen but, given the movie’s shallow explorations of Oher’s feelings and past, he’s easily upstaged by Jae Head as the Touhys’ cocky and insufferably cutesy son SJ (an Alex P. Keaton type, right down to his sweater vest).

Though Hancock tries to force some conflict in the film’s last third, The Blind Side is ultimately more about the merits of white paternalism than a child’s struggle to overcome his trying circumstances.