enjoyable, but a bit too melodramatic

Rating: 6/10 (14 April 2013)

When I started watching this movie, I thought to myself, "this is an important movie". This is a movie about discrimination and racism in the early 1970s and the courage it took to deal with it.
And the movie was fairly enjoyable and it was clear who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. Denzel gave a stellar performance. And the actor portraying the football captain did a great job as well in capturing the nuances and subtleties of his character.
But it seemed overly melodramatic. I find it inconceivable that the Board of Education would have appointed coach Boone with the intention of firing him after his first loss. It just seemed a bit much and overblown.
And then one of the referees started intentionally calling bad plays against Boone's team -- I thought it was highly improbable that this happened the way it was depicted in the movie.
And then I started wondering what really happened. Frankly, I would have preferred something closer to reality than what was depicted. It was all a bit too melodramatic and fanciful and not grounded in reality, so much so that I felt fairly cynical toward the movie and wondered if anything outside of the basic facts was even true -- the basic facts being that Boone was hired to coach and his team won the state championship the first year.
As a comparison, imagine a movie where Abraham Lincoln uses his magical powers to sway the course of the Civil War in the right direction. Would it have added drama to what actually happened ? Yes, but then it becomes a piece of fiction and starts to bear little/no relevance to our society.
Similarly, I think there was so much dramatic license taken that, instead being an important biographical work, the movie ended up being a sappy melodrama that bore little no relationship to what actually must have happened.
As a piece of fiction, it's fairly enjoyable and dramatic. As a biographical/historical piece, it's a fairly empty and unsatisfying piece of work.
In sum, it's like junk food -- it tastes good, but it's not really good or healthy for you in the long run...