The Express (2008)
Directed by Gary Fleder
Follow the inspirational life of college football hero Ernie Davis, the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy.
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What critics compared The Express to
That’s why the best pigskin flicks—including Peter Berg’s Friday Night Lights and Oliver Stone’s underrated Any Given Sunday—elevate it to something resembling gladiatorial combat.
“The Express” is a decent football movie, just about good enough to be the 40th best episode of “Friday Night Lights.”
It’s like an episode of “Friday Night Lights,” where the drama just so happens to be taking place on a football field.
Directed by Gary Fleder ( “Runaway Jury” ) and adapted by Charles Leavitt ( “Blood Diamond” ) from Robert Gallagher’s book, the film is awash in aphorisms and clichés.
But it does limit how far director Gary Fleder (Kiss the Girls) and screenwriter Charles Leavitt (Blood Diamond) can go, especially since most of the action occurs in the late 1950s, before the civil rights movement took hold in the U.S.
Despite being cruelly abridged, Ernie’s triumph-over-adversity story is inspiring and optimistic enough without the orchestra playing cheerleader and screenwriter Charles Leavitt (Blood Diamond) turning every spat into a speech and every other line into a pearl of wisdom.
The Express was written by Blood Diamond scribe Charles Leavitt (from Robert Gallagher's biography) and directed by Gary Fleder, whose most recent feature film was 2003's singularly preposterous The Runaway Jury.