Starring Rob Brown, Dennis Quaid. Written by Charles Leavitt, based on the book by Robert Gallagher. Directed by Gary Fleder. (PG) 129 min. Opens Oct 10.
It’s hard not to be moved by the story of Ernie Davis, who in 1962 became the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy as the United States’ outstanding college football player, only to die one year later of leukemia at the age of 23. It’s equally difficult, however, to accept The Express as any sort of fitting tribute: Gary Fleder’s film pumps its subject up well beyond recognizable human proportions while indulging in every inspirational-sports-movie cliché in the post-Remember the Titans playbook.
There’s certainly no room in the film for Rob Brown to give any sort of performance as Davis — when every scene is designed to emphasize the man’s basic goodness and decency the possibility of spontaneity or nuance is obliterated. Fleder directs the film the same way the Syracuse Orangemen organized their offence around Ernie Davis: he keeps running the same play, straight down the middle and into the ground. And, speaking of coaching, there’s not much that Dennis Quaid can do with his role as Davis' mentor Ben Schwartzwalder, a (say it with me) crusty old pro who has to (say it with me) learn to see past his own prejudices en route to glory road. Quaid, who did excellent work in the similarly schmaltzy true-story baseball flick The Rookie a few years back, alternates between staring stoically into the middle distance and peppering his dialogue with weird, Jack Nicholsonian inflections.
Screenwriter Robert Gallagher’s attempts to foreground Davis’ personal struggles against the Civil Rights movement feel half-hearted — though they do allow for the requisite archival montage of demonstrations and Martin Luther King — and the gridiron action rings false: surely Davis was stopped occasionally in between touchdown trots.