'Pride'

Comments (0) By Robert Wilonsky Tuesday, Mar 13 2007

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Pride
Directed by Sunu Gonera
Lionsgate, opens March 23

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The feature debut from South African director Sunu Gonera is straight from the sports-film playbook, the one in which an underdog team coached by an obstinate overachiever overcomes obstacles and adversity to take home the gold. It's Hoosiersin a swimming pool—well, Glory Road, anyway, given this is about a group of black swimmers competing against all-white teams who wouldn't toss the brothers a life preserver if they were drowning in the deep end. Like most sports pics, Prideis based on a true-life tale, that of Jim Ellis (played here by Terrence Howard), a former college swimmer who, in the 1970s, resuscitates a Philly rec center by filling the pool with water and some neighborhood kids with hope. Destined to be drug-runners for a dangerous but ultimately dim neighborhood thug, the kids instead excel between the lane ropes. If everything about the movie is overly familiar, at least Gonera and his writers get the details right; the pool sequences capture the isolation of the competitive swimmer who crawls for miles in lonely, aching silence. Howard, playing Ellis with equal measures of desperation and determination, is terrific—when is he not? Better still is Bernie Mac as the rec center's janitor, who is suspicious of Ellis's motives until at last he dives in. If nothing else, Pridehas the best sports-film soundtrack ever—Philly funk and soul, '70s style. And hell, that'll get ya wet.