Sticky sweet: halfway through the picture my teeth were hurting.

Rating: 4/10 (27 December 2000)

I may not be what one would call a dyed-in-the-wool sports buff, but football, combined with mandatory school integration in the South of thirty years ago, sounds like it would make for a pretty confrontational picture. Instead, Remember the Titans gives us a paint-by-numbers cast of goody goods, villainous townspeople and teary-eyed, reformed-overnight racists who suddenly "see the light" in time with appropriately swelling musical accompaniment. And of course there's one guy in the hospital watching the final Big Game on television as the others play their hearts out for him: I'm not kidding, it's that cliche. It was unintentionally funny when, near the end, one of the characters said "Is this really about football anyway?"

I believe I was looking to Denzel, as the football coach with everything to prove in this one season, to anchor the film a little more forcefully -- the kind of charismatic individual who could bring the warring factors of a newly integrated high school football team together with dramatic, yet plausible energy. Alas, he's a cypher, lost somewhere in the middle of a plot that's on Automatic Pilot anyway -- suddenly Christopher Plummer's character in The Sound of Music looks decisive.
Funny coincidence is, while I was waiting for Titans to start, I went over to the next auditorium where Men of Honor was playing and watched that for a few minutes. Men of Honor is a film about mandatory integration of the military; I won't know til I see the whole thing whether it's a good movie or not, but I can say safely that there's a lot more material to be explored within that topic than in the relatively "safe controversy" and easy targets at which Remember the Titans is aiming.