PLOT: This is an account of the rise to fame of the Texas Western Miners, circa 1966, when the team had several black players and U.S. college basketball was still dominated by white players.
Basketball and Derek Luke -- that's a pretty obvious recipe for entertainment. Glory Road is yet another sport-as-metaphor-for-American-life epic, the story of how the underdog and mostly black Texas Western Miners grabbed the NCAA championship from the all-white Kentucky Wildcats 40 years ago.
As a movie, Glory Road is what you might call a great watch, with plenty of rousing court action and a healthy portion of indomitable human spirit.
As an historical document it's, ah, it's a movie. To its credit, Glory Road is much less heavy-handed than similar outings, but it's still weird how all of America's racial issues get solved regularly during one historic game or another on the big screen, only to pop up again. Today. Don't you think?
Josh Lucas stars in Glory Road as famed basketball coach Don Haskins. He gets his first college coaching job at poor and scrappy Texas Western, and his determination to build a winning basketball team finds him recruiting players from all over the country. Most of his recruits are black. The film is set in 1965-66, a time in America when segregation was even more the norm, that Civil Rights Act notwithstanding.
As Haskins, Lucas gets to motivate his players on the court, handle the bigoted local naysayers worried about all those "negroes" on the team and stare into the middle distance with integrity.
Among his players are the superb Derek Luke (Antwone Fisher) as Miner's famed guard Bobby Joe Hill, MTV's Al Shearer as Nevil Shed, Damaine Radcliff as Scoops Cager and Schin A.S. Kerr as Daddy D Lattin.
Also in the cast is Jon Voight (tricked out with prosthetic nose and earlobes) as Adolph Rupp, vaguely villainous coach of the powerhouse University of Kentucky Wildcats.
Glory Road follows the team's progress as they go from win to win around the country.
There are racially charged incidents along the way -- the black players get their hotel rooms trashed, fans throw garbage, there are threatening letters to the coach's wife.
Then there are various personal challenges the players themselves must overcome. One player needs to find courage. One has trouble with his heart. Another needs to use his brain. And so they go to find the wizard. Wait -- wrong movie.
What we meant to say is that several players struggle with one thing or another but wind up becoming a true team. It's all very endearing. More or less.
What really works here are the basketball games. Thanks to stunning camera work, Glory Road has some terrific sport sequences, poetry-in-motion type court choreography delivered with a competitive charge. The film honours a season in basketball that had profound social and historical ramifications. Glory Road is not a great movie, but better a middling, formulaic effort that honours the players than nothing at all.
BOTTOM LINE: An obvious must-see for fans of the game and a reasonable way to keep the story of the Miners and their glory days alive.
(This film is rated PG)
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