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80Even if you already knew the facts, you won'' be able to help but reflect in awe at how much progress in the fight against discrimination has been made on a societal level.
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80Rob Brown (Stop-Loss) gives a graceful, understated performance as Ernie Davis.
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75Involving and inspiring in the way a good movie about sports almost always is.
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75Deserves plenty of credit for exploring racial issues story in more realistic terms.
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75Despite appealing performances and kinetic football scenes, the storytelling is mostly conventional.
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75While Ernie's on-field accomplishments were extraordinary, it was the environment in which he struggled to achieve them that makes him the worthy subject of a motion picture.
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70Thanks to a rock-solid performance by Dennis Quaid, nice historical touches and energetic direction by Gary Fleder, the tried-and-true formula is given a welcome shot of adrenaline.
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70If a movie of this kind didn't traffic in overstatement, it wouldn't be doing its job, which is to provide a strong dose of simple, rousing emotion.
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70The Express finesses a cinematic hat trick: It's entertaining, deeply moving and genuinely important.
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Though The Express may stretch the limits of probability, holding up Davis as an athletic superman incapable of losing, it's also that rare sports film that isn't afraid to dabble in personal and social ambiguity.
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Has Dennis Quaid really never played a college football coach before? With his handsome, craggy face and likable intensity, he was born for the job, and he's the main attraction in The Express.
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63A decent football movie, just about good enough to be the 40th best episode of "Friday Night Lights" . . . which has aired 39 episodes.
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63Davis led an unquestionably inspirational life, but The Express, however heartfelt, is uninspired.
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63Many inspirational sports movies provide only junk food for thought; this one contains some authentic reflections of sport in the civil rights era.
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60Sports biodramas generally take one of two tacks: gauzily sentimental or scrappy tale of struggle. The Express runs the thin line between the two and, to its benefit, more often than not hits the first mark.
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60While never as trailblazing as its subject, The Express is a worthy addition to the lengthy canon of sports biopics
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60Crowdpleasing and oh-so-predictable.
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58Maybe the real Ernie Davis really was this perfect, but the movie plays as if the filmmakers didn't want to offend his family.
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58It's a fine moral and an admirable statement, but it's the portrait of an icon rather than the story of the person thrust into that position.
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50Too often The Express sidelines its own main character in favor of the lemon-sucking, jaw-jutting glower patented by Quaid.
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50The Express eventually reaches its triumph-of-the-human-spirit climax, but it yanks too hard on the heart strings during the long journey there.
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50This movie is especially egregious since it bundles the civil rights era, garden-variety bigotry, and the achievements of Ernie Davis, the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy.
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50Any one of these narrative components might have made for a worthy picture. But that would have taken a more imaginative writer than Charles Leavitt and a more sensitive director than Gary Fleder.
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If one will pardon the obvious analogy, The Express ends up feeling like a fumble at the goal line, coming across as simple-minded and melodramatic.
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50Long on inspiration, short on specifics.
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42The Express may prove valuable to movie historians since it's a compendium of virtually every sports movie cliché ever contrived.
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Like all formulaic biopics, The Express sacrifices the details for the Big Picture--hagiography without the humanity.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 9 out of 10
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Mixed: 0 out of 10
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Negative: 1 out of 10
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msmitty9A very entertaining movie that is well worth the money. Theres a little bit of everything in the movie with very good football attributes.
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JayH.3
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SteveTripp7Good film overall. Didn't have the fluidity that most good piopics have but I still recommend it.