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The fact-based football film "The Blind Side" doesn’t even become a football film until around the one-hour mark. At that point, it starts slipping downhill into minor-league territory, falling into more than a few hollow and predictable traps along the way.
Before then, this Cinderella story about the early days of Baltimore Ravens left tackle Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron) and the upscale Memphis family who adopted and saved him from a life of pain and poverty is a rather tender and charming human drama.
Shortly after being admitted to a nearly all-white Christian high school, Oher, an alienated, uneducated and homeless gentle giant, meets Leigh Anne Touhy (Sandra Bullock), the no-nonsense mother of one of his classmates. On a frigid night, Touhy invites Oher to stay in her home and, before long, she’s nurturing him as one of her own and leading him down the path to a football scholarship.
The quiet and unconventional mother-son relationship is the film’s truest component and a few early scenes tug at the heartstrings. Despite an unconvincing country accent, Bullock is highly entertaining as the pampered but powerful Southern belle who wears the designer pants in her family and wields her maternal instincts like a weapon.
But that entertainment wears off once it’s realized Touhy is broadly drawn and underdeveloped, as are the rest of the movie’s characters. This flaw is most apparent and off-putting with Oher, who’s given practically no personality, humanity or believable arc. Writer/director John Lee Hancock, whose script is an adaptation of the book, "The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game" by Michael Lewis, never gets inside Oher’s head. His film is more about the satisfaction of the wealthy people who helped the underprivileged player than about the player himself. Surrounded by whispers of racism, Touhy and Co. claim Oher is "changing their lives," but such a profound effect is never made palpable.
The tale of Oher’s ascension from the projects to the pros is remarkable and inspiring. "The Blind Side?" Not so much
The Blind Side
PG-13
Two reels out of four
In area theaters tomorrow
Br�no
R
Now available
"Br�no," the latest envelope-pusher from British comedian and mockumentary mastermind Sacha Baron Cohen, is bolder and better than its 2006 predecessor, "Borat," delivering tearful laughs and jaw-dropping shocks in equal measure.
Skewering both our celebrity-obsessed culture and the world’s intolerance, this zany account of an Austrian fashion reporter trying to make it in America backs its gross gags with biting social commentary. No other movie this year made me laugh harder.
