OK family fare... not much else

Rating: 5/10 (17 December 2009)

What starts out promisingly as a coming of age bio about a downtrodden kid from the bad side of town quickly turns into a semi farce replete with set up jokes and useless scenes where this boy/man can do no wrong and get's 2nd chances and preferential treatment from everyone. The first half of this film is actually good although a very over simplified covering of the subject matter.
Character development is minimal, we know nothing of the motivations of the wife or her reasoning only that she has an answer for everything, nothing about the husband other than he is rich and he does whatever his wife says, and the rest of the family is made up of a pretty girl whose unlike 95% of normal teens in the fact that she doesn't question her mother bringing home a strange kid from her school to live with them, and the son is just another Hollywood wise cracking 8 yr old who speaks way above his age level and somehow has the ability to coach a football player even though his only experience has been watching it on TV. The mother is a football expert too who calls the coaches cell phone to tell him how to run the game and mouths off to racist redneck fans without any consequences. The coach is just a horrible caricature with the worst lines in the movie.
We get all the typical black/white and football clichés and from there it just goes into this boring montage of ridiculously overacting college coaches promising him the world if he plays for them and of course his little brother unrealistically is in on every meeting demanding things for himself by pushing around grown men. This is interspersed with shots of his tutor (a dull Katy Bates) and teachers all seemingly on the verge of tears because they are so inspired by this kid who barely speaks. Then Michael Oher briefly turns into to a action hero and the mother into Dirty Harry who threatens drug gangs and they don't even respond because she's packing heat but so are they. Then suddenly hot young white chicks are attracted to this dorky overweight guy during his college orientation.
The oddest thing is the end where they show the real Michael Oher and family simply proving to us that movies are mostly made up as the actors portraying them are twice as good looking as the real folks.
I wanted to like this movie but it was so meandering and silly that it failed me early on and from there on I just wanted it to end.