Yet another Disney raid on the annals of sport for an Inspirational True Story: the 1966 NCAA basketball final in which the upstart Miners of Texas Western (today, UTEP) sent out five blacks for the opening tip against the "basketball royalty" of the all-white Kentucky Wildcats. This story, within a larger story of sports in America as an agency of social change and collective consciousness-raising, is such an intrinsically good one (what took so long to get to it?) that it cannot really benefit from dramatization, or more particularly, Disneyfication. Nor can it benefit from its transformation into a visual accompaniment for a double-disc collection of golden oldies. It does depict some good practice sessions and good coaching lessons, with the dagger-eyed Josh Lucas as Don Haskins, the fifth-year coach at Texas Western, not first-year, as portrayed here, much less straight from coaching a high-school girls' team. (Ah, Hollywood.) And Jon Voight, in a putty nose to rival the one he wore as Howard Cosell in Ali, creates a sizable diversion in his comical but not disrespectful portrait of the old-school Kentucky coach, Adolph Rupp. ("You're going to win this game," he assures his disarrayed troops in the desperate waning minutes. "Now go out there and make me a prophet.") And there are a couple of gratifying shots of UK black students huddled around a TV set in a dorm room and stifling their cheers for the opposition. With Derek Luke, Austin Nichols, Mehcad Brooks; directed by James Gartner. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd
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