Remember the Titans Review

There are roughly ten minutes here made by the man who directed Fresh: the first days of training camp, players sorting themselves by color in the dining hall, the flat hostility of the Alexandria streets. Then the Bruckheimer machinery takes over. Denzel Washington plays Herman Boone as a man who has decided that being impossible is the only tool available to him, and he holds the center without once asking to be liked. Will Patton is better still as Bill Yoast, a decent coach asked to accept a demotion and to keep his temper about it, and the two of them can carry a scene with almost nothing on the page.

The football is shot as highlight reel, all slow motion and hits that crack like gunfire, and the needle drops arrive on schedule to tell you what to feel. The dishonesty is structural rather than incidental. Integration gets solved by a run through Gettysburg and a song, and every bigot in town converts on cue. Ryan Gosling, as the benched lineman Alan Bosley, gets one good beat of sullen resentment before the script forgives him for it.