Disappointing treatment of a serious issue

Rating: 3/10 (10 January 2016)

I have watched with interest the wave of change moving through the world after CTE (Chronic traumatic encephalopathy) was revealed to be occurring in young football players and not just boxers. A PBS doco from a few years ago was enlightening and described how the American football industry fought against the science. While this film tells the story more or less accurately (as I understand it) it does so in such a clichéd and insulting manner it is barely watchable.
OK so it's got Will Smith in it, enough said. I think he is a good actor, but he tends to make awful films (Six digress was clearly an anomaly). I never found him believable as Dr Bennet Omalu, the radically religious pathologist from Nigeria who stumbles upon the first ever documented CTE case. Maybe it was the accent, maybe it was the performance. But he just seemed like a mellowed out Will Smith talking in a funny accent rather than a real person who I felt was worth investing 2 hours in.
The film-makers were obliged to tack on a romantic sub-plot to give Smith something other to do than cut up the brains of dead footballers. The long list of not nice things which happen to the devout doctor are peppered with your typical Hollywood mechanisms, trying to force you to feel empathy and join the cast on an emotional journey. It just doesn't work... we've seen it all before: Sport as a form of patriotism, the tragedy, the unrealistic soundtrack (turns out Nigerian doctors enjoy listening to nice accessible 70's soul music when they are working, none of that weird African stuff you might expect them to listen to). I knew the story and I still wasn't able to care about what was happening to these people.
What this comes down to is Hollywood trying to take a collision between sport and science to the lowest common denominator. American football gets a mention in this film, therefore football fans might be part of the audience, therefore they need to dumb this down as much as possible for them. They actually refrain from even naming the types of proteins causing the brain damage, instead having smith refer to them as "bad proteins".
What films like this do is remind me how the film-makers don't actually care about the story, they are creating a product and ultimately want to sell their product to as many people as possible using as little creativity as possible. They even end the film with a nice feel good dollop of sickening patriotism, revealing that Dr Omalu has become an American citizen. They chose to finish with that detail but ignore the fact that as a result of Omalu's determination to have the issue placed under the spotlight, sporting codes all around the world are reassessing how contact sports are trained and played, with concussion assessments being implemented on game day in soccer, rugby, Australian rules etc.
But why would the film-makers care about that? They have awards to win...