Titians wanna be that fumbles and ultimately gets shut out

Rating: Null/10 (17 October 2004)

I went into this film hyped as I had heard so much about it and as a movie buff I had actually resisted my urge to frequent the fluff of the past 2 months waiting for something special. On the edge of my seat with anticipation, it soon became evident that this film could not deliver the goods. Ironically the stars of this, one of my years worst films, have each starred in two of my favorite films of all time. The Antwone Fisher guy, plus the lead actor looks like the little ledwicky clan leader of the film "War" all grown up. The Antwone guy does an imitation of Tyrell Owens or any other cocky jock, but this is not any inspired performance as we saw that best when another guy said "Show me the money." The pace of the film was weird at best. The state of the art multiplex I saw it in had distorted sound for the first 5 minutes, however considering 30 minutes of shabby pacing I couldn't tell you if the initial sound disrortion was
a theater problem or just another short coming of a bad film. With regard to pacing, within the first few minutes we fast forward to where the guys are just being guys grabbing soda pops and trying to make out with their choice of girl. Before we know it, in the absence of any real plot or character development, the team takes the field and we are suppose to care who wins...why ? I found myself getting aggravated that the audience is suppose to cheer for the team simply because they have the screen time and are not exactly quite the bad guys. After curling up and trying to bare it and see if it would get any better, I noticed that the entire theater was only politely sitting by and watching, far from what is expected from a sports film. I ended up, finally, leaving and going to catch the end of another film as I could take no more by about the 50 minute mark. If you want a real homage to "Remember the Titans", "Radio" of course is one, however there is a little DVD gem called "Unshackled" with the common theme of integration although the sport in this case is basketball. If you get that film you are in store for a treat. "Unshackled" has an alumni of "Titans" playing the hero this time as opposed to the antagonist as he did in that film.