It does seem a bit odd to me that it’s taken the powers in Hollywood over forty five years to come with an Ernie Davis biopic considering this is a story that is so ripe with success, tragedy and melodrama that the script is practically written already. Then toss in the absolute overpowering presence of Jim Brown and framed by all the Jim Crow nonsense that was going on back in the day and you would think that this is fable that was begging to be told. Why it took this long, I don’t know, but despite its somewhat late arrival ‘The Express’ has arrived and it is a fine, albeit formulaic, football film.

‘The Express’ largely focuses on the sophomore year of Ernie Davis at Syracuse when the Orangemen had their best season ever and played the University of Texas in the 1960 Cotton Bowl for the National Championship. But before then the film does give us some insight to Davis’ life as a child when he was saddled with a debilitating stutter, and the love shown to him by his grandfather Pops (Charles S. Dutton) and grandmother Elizabeth (Elizabeth Shivers). Eventually Ernie’s birth mom Marie (Aunjenue Ellis) reappears, now financially solvent, and takes Ernie to his new home of Elmira New York.

It is in Elmira where Ernie Davis (Rob Brown) becomes a standout athlete and gets the attention of the nations football recruiters. Now as this movie tells it legendary Syracuse football coach Ben Swartzwalder (Dennis Quaid) was reticent about recruiting Davis considering the difficulty he perceived he had with his previous star running back Jim Brown (Darrin Dewitt Henson), and for that matter we are supposed to believe that Swartzwalder was even unaware of Davis’ existence. I don’t know what recruiting was like in the 1950’s, but I’m thinking a big time program would be fully aware of some superstar running back playing basically in his backyard, probably beginning when this kid was in the 8^th grade. Regardless, coach Swartzwalder ignores his reticence about bringing this particular black dude on campus and actually enlists the help of his former troublesome black dude to secure the rights to this newer bigger faster black dude.

Now on campus young Ernie Davis impresses the coaches with his ability, makes friends with his teammates, except for the one or two that hate black people. He also manages to track down the one Black college girl in the northeast in the pretty Sarah Ward (Nicole Beharie) which is a damn good thing since Coach Swartzwalder spared no words in giving Ernie his ‘no white girls’ speech. Ernie would continue to lead his team to many glorious inspirational victories which would garner him the Heisman Trophy, the first Black Athlete to do so. He would also be drafted into the NFL by the Cleveland Browns creating a the Davis / Brown dream backfield, but alas fate would deal Ernie Davis a hand from the bottom of the deck as he would become seriously ill and never play a down for the Browns, expiring in 1963 at the tender age of 23.

It’s quite possible that Lando Calrissian and Sonny Corleone closed the door on the dying athlete movie with ‘Brian’s Song’ thirty five years ago. Not only closed the door but put nails in it, filled it with concrete and threw it in the Pacific Ocean, but as I’ve said before football movies are very hard to screw up and Gary Fledler’s ‘The Express’ easily avoids this rare bad football movie by staying tried and true to the sports / racism formula which also worked well in the similar, but superior in my opinion , ‘Remember the Titans’ and the inferior ‘Glory Road’. But even though ‘The Express’ is a good movie it does fall well short of being a great one. Rob Brown did a reasonably good job of playing Ernie Davis but I don’t think he infused his character with enough of the personality that the real life Ernie Davis was supposed to possess, and though from all accounts Ernie Davis was a good man, here he’s presented as almost pristine which I think takes away from some of the humanity of the character. Also the eventual illness and death of Ernie Davis didn’t have the emotional impact on me that I would have expected such a terribly sad tragedy to have, but then this is a movie more about Davis’ life than his death. Surprisingly I thought Darrin Dewitt Henson did an outstanding job portraying Jim Brown as the edgy force of personality that he had to have been back then, and that he still is today at age of seventy. The representation of the football action was well presented too, though there sure were a lot of running backs hurdling defenders in this movie. Just a week ago there was a highlight of a player hurdling a defender which prompted Craig ‘the pony’ James to comment that the play was nice, but bad things tend to happen to running backs who leave their feet. Except in this movie where Ernie Davis was almost more Edwin Moses than running back.

There was some controversy about the racist scenes that took place in West Virginia and Texas, and though these scenes were probably fictional in nature in how they related to Ernie Davis, I think they did accurately reflect the time. While talking with my father who was also a college football all-American, skills he failed to pass down to his second born, and played at the same time that Ernie Davis played, concurred that things were pretty bad for players playing in the south, though admittedly my father attended an HBCU so some of this was lessened to an extent, though the epithets, and segregation was in full effect as he tells it.

All in all ‘The Express’ was a good football movie that included all the things that one expects when watching a sentimental melodramatic football movie. It seemed to me since this was a film that was so long overdue that perhaps given this extra time it could have been just a little more impactful.