Honest, earnest and textbook storytelling that doesn't achieve the emotional touchdown it hoped for

Rating: 6/10 (17 June 2016)

What could have been an exhilarating story of putting a Nigerian doctor in the centre of a major controversy involving America's biggest sports body NFL, it rather whimpers into a safe and uninteresting screenplay that trudges to the finish line that you are already waiting for so long. Will Smith might have been too big a star to portray the earnest with the accent and all, my take would have been to have either Chiwetel Ejiofor or Jamie Foxx play it instead.
Dr. Bennet Omalu (Will Smith) is an accomplished, unconventional and very passionate pathologist who has immigrated to United States from Nigeria. He has a very practical vision about the American dream, meets a girl Prema (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) through the Church and they fall in love and get married. All goes well until he unearths a pattern of deaths related to retired football players starting with a local favorite Mike Webster (David Morse). When Dr. Omalu starts raising his voice through print media by relating the head banging of the game leading to long term fatal health issues, he becomes a target for one of the biggest and most powerful corporations of United States.
Featuring an ensemble of very talented actors, it is safe to say that it is a very well acted movie. But the main problem is the safe direction, which follows a textbook storytelling approach in such a linear format of a script without a bit of innovation in screenplay might feel a bit too exhausting considering its runtime. It also deliberates a bit too long on a love story that feels a little underwhelming. I understand it is a story of a real person and we can't and shouldn't do much to elevate the drama and entertainment factor just for the sake of it, but the script could have focused outside of Dr. Omalu's life and other people involved in this piece of history and identified some other interesting aspects around them. After all it is not a documentary and some documentaries these days are more interesting than this movie. It is not just the story, but presentation matters, entertainment matters and very likely commercial aspects matter considering Will Smith with no resemblance whatsoever with Dr. Omalu and being a huge star gets cast in the lead.
Honest, earnest and textbook storytelling that doesn't achieve the emotional touchdown it hoped for.