Just about every sports cliché eventually appears. Further, the film isvery slow and really doesn't show the development of Ernie. The moviehas ambitions to be much more than a sports movie but doesn't realizeany of them. You don't walk away knowing any more about what it waslike to be black back in the 40's and 50's and what race relations werelike. I suspect that this film will get to video very quickly.

I rated this a 4 — it's two hours of my life wasted.

Told through the eyes of up and coming black American footballsensation Ernie Davis, The Express delivers a two punch game thatfights on two fields which turn out to be one in the same. Ostensiblythe feature is about Ernie's battle to the top of the game back in itsearliest days when to be black was looked upon as something of aweakness or automatic disqualification from being taken seriously. Onthis purely face value level, the movie does well; it has the buildingstructure and bubbling tension needed to create the necessary highs andlows of a typical, engrossing sports movie. Watching Ernie is likewatching a legend, and that's exactly what it should be like. Sureenough the man is more or less untouchable in the movie's first twothirds, but showing his weaknesses on field would be superfluous atbest. Instead the script leaves much of Davis' conflict and hardship tobe faced off the pitch, even when he's playing on it. At its heart, TheExpress is a moral tale of people coming together and letting parts ofthemselves go that maybe they hadn't thought through quite thoroughlyenough; at its core, The Express is about racial discrimination.Counterbalancing the much more visceral aspects of the feature withthis emotive, heart felt drama; the movie achieves both a sense ofwonder and relevancy that still rings true to this day.

Despite the script's well intentioned spirit however, all does not gowell when it is finally given transition to the big screen. DirectorGary Fleder and composer Mark Isham too often inject the feature withan overbearing, sometimes sickening level of sugar coated melodrama.From the sweeping strings of Isham's sentimentally ridden compositionsto Fleder's insistence on emphasising start contrasts between thestories dark and light moments, The Express sometimes boils down tomere caricature that belittles the ideas that the script is trying toget across. Thankfully though, all is not lost in either of theirabilities; Isham does far better when scoring for the movie's fastermoving segments and Fleder gets some hard hitting and poignantperformances out of his main cast. The movie's central performancesfrom Rob Brown and Dennis Quaid are nothing of any remarkablesignificance, but they serve their purposes well and do justice to thecharacters that they are playing; sure enough Quaid can be hiswithdrawn, wooden self from time to time, but his presence is a finemixture of warm and cold, enough to make the relationship between thetwo main characters compelling to watch develop.

As engrossing as this can all be though, it's oft hard to swallow someof what the movie tries so hard to press upon you; it's a film thattries to raise questions whilst simultaneously answering without beingtoo cynical, and for the most part, does that well enough, even if itis all a little too dependant on sucrose for its own good. So whilewatching The Express can feel a little like getting force-fed anover-sized, over-iced and over-baked cake to chow down on for twohours, the end result is at least in itself, satisfying. Telling astory of perseverance against the most uncomfortable of challengeswhilst at the same time incorporating themes of friendship, family andeven a little football into the mix, The Express is a movie that ismore about the substance beneath rather than the sometimes troublesomecrust that encompasses. It takes a long time to get there, and arguablyends far too late, but for anyone looking for an uplifting andinspiring tale of one man changing the course of history forever, thenThe Express should do well enough.

- A review by Jamie Robert Ward (http://www.invocus.net)

Brown plays Davis well as the idealistic young kid who takes as hisideal Jackie Robinson and the significance he had breaking the colorline in professional baseball. Black people were already playingprofessional football at this time also, but the sport was not what itis today or in fact would shortly become starting in the middle Fiftieswhen Davis was in college ball at the University of Syracuse.

A guy who had a lot to do with that was Ernie Davis's predecessor atthe University of Syracuse Jim Brown as played by Darrin DeWitt Henson.Brown's place among professional football immortals is quite assuredand he came to the Cleveland Browns with the reputation from college hemore than lived up to.

In fact it's Brown that Coach Ben Schwartzwalder uses to recruit Davisto the Orangemen of Syracuse. Dennis Quaid plays the coach and he givesone of his best performances in his career. In fact it's right in linewith another football film Any Given Sunday where he plays an agingquarterback with heart and guts, but losing a step or two in the field.

The film is about Quaid almost as much as about Rob Brown. The coachlearns that he's living in extraordinary times for America, mostextraordinary for black America. His players are not separate and apartfrom the social changes going on, they and the game cannot be kept in avacuum. Proof of that comes when the Orangemen of Syracuse go south toplay West Virginia and later the University of Texas in the Cotton Bowlwhich was more of a war than an athletic contest.

Ernie Davis beat out Jim Brown in two special categories. He was thefirst black man to win the Heisman Trophy for Best College Footballplayer and probably earned it by dint of the fact that he unlike Brownled Syracuse to a national championship. It was a fact the HeismanCommittee could not ignore.

The football sequences as in Any Given Sunday are done incredibly well,choreographed would not be a bad word to describe them. Davis did infact say he would let his field exploits do his talking and they spokeloud and clear.

I hope some Oscar nominations are in the future for both Quaid andBrown. The Express will go down in history as one of the best sportsfilms ever done and it goes along way towards keeping the story ofErnie Davis alive for generations to come.

This could have been known as a factual, historically truthful movie IFthe makers had not taken unnecessary racial shot at West VirginiaUniversity while producing the film.

The movie includes a scene in which Mountaineer fans hurl racial slursand trash at Davis and his Syracuse University teammates during a 1959game in Morgantown.

West Virginia was never mentioned in the original Charles Levittscript, nor did WVU play Syracuse during this historical time frame.Thus the film falsely depicts the West Virginia and WVU.

Levitt says the script he gave Universal Pictures did not mention WV orWest Virginia University. He had said that the scene was supposed todepict a 1958 game at Tar Heels Stadium in North Carolina – a choicethat also displayed artistic license.

"It is a sad fact of my business that when a screenwriter turns ascript over to a studio, the studio and the filmmakers own it," wroteLeavitt. "They can do anything they want with it – even rewrite partsof it without consulting me and without my knowledge or consent."