Fact-based or fictional, no genre sticks to the playbook more rigidly than the sports drama. Creditable addition to the canon though it is, The Express does not buck the trend.
 
Reaching its goal with 99% perspiration (mainly from the brows of composer Mark Isham’s overworked horn and strings sections) and 1% inspiration, Gary Fleder’s biopic of doomed Heisman-winning hero Ernie Davis is 100% conventional.
 
Born poor in Pennsylvania but raised right by his grandpops (Charles S. Dutton), young Ernie (Brown, doubling his sportography after Coach Carter) has all the skill and speed that Syracuse University’s gravel-gulleted, play-til-you-puke Coach Schwarzwalder (Quaid) needs to replace his NFL-bound star Jim Brown.
 
Unfortunately, no matter who or where you are – even in the ‘progressive’ state of New York - life in the early 1960s is very much black-and-white.
 
But with a fellow minority teammate to show him the ropes and a gorgeous new girl at his side, Ernie is soon tackling opponents and prejudice with equal fervour.

As the ‘Orangemen’ eye up their first championship and the civil rights movement gets behind its latest icon, hostile receptions await on both fronts.

But Ernie and the boys ain’t seen nuthin’ til they gets to Texas. And all those nosebleeds he’s having can’t be good either…
 
Despite being cruelly abridged, Ernie’s triumph-over-adversity story is inspiring and optimistic enough without the orchestra playing cheerleader and screenwriter Charles Leavitt (Blood Diamond) turning every spat into a speech and every other line into a pearl of wisdom.
 
“When you’ve got a thoroughbred, you do not lock him in the barn” says Schwarzwalder, before spending the rest of the season finding excuses to take Ernie out of the game.

But whenever the script fumbles, Fleder keeps the ball moving while Quaid and the appealingly unassuming Brown handle the clichés with aplomb.

Ernie’s tragic endgame does take the film into overtime, but this is one biopic which neither feels overblown nor full of its own importance. Refreshing.

Elliott Noble