'Glory Road'

Comments (0) By Matt Singer Tuesday, Jan 10 2006

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Glory Road
Directed by James Gartner
Walt Disney, in release

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Sports fans who hate basketball joke that the game would be improved if you gave each team 100 points and two minutes to play instead of 48. The same could be said of the basketball film Glory Road, wherein producer Jerry Bruckheimer combines the plot from his Remember the Titans—where the improbable success of a racially integrated team teaches everyone the meaning of equality—with the most obvious hoop-film clichés: the long-suffering coach's wife, the slacker who must get his grades up, the moment where the team clicks and they all point and nod at each other in slow motion. In the press notes, Bruckheimer proclaims the story of Coach Don Haskins (Josh Lucas) and the 1966 Texas Western Miners who won the NCAA championship with an all–African American starting lineup "one of the great classics of American history." But the team's accomplishments are here diluted into fodder for another of the producer's feel-good man-weepies. As Coach Haskins would have put it, "It's activity without accomplishment."