Sean Porter (Johnson) is a juvenile detention centre guard who realises something's wrong: 75 percent of boys who leave either die or come straight back. So he forms a football club, hoping to encourage discipline and break down the gangland barriers the boys have carried into detention. Of course, it doesn't go smoothly, and the camp's administrators (Rippy and Dunn) keep threatening to shut down the programme. But if Sean can make a difference in one boy's life, it'll be worth it.

The style and tone leave no doubts where this is going, as a swell of orchestration accompanies anything even remotely emotional. The first "I am Spartacus" moment happens early on, so we know there's more solidarity and loyalty to come as these young men to learn to work as a team, rather than trying to kill each other. Clearly what they need is some brutally violent American football to channel their aggressions.

The characters are fairly complex, which makes the film watchable. The strong central conflict is between two mortal-enemy gang rivals (Yorker and Thomas) who find an uneasy respect. Taase is the tough meathead, Mo is the cocky jock, O'Brien is emotionally needy white guy, and so on. Johnson is great with action or comedy, but he struggles with these rousingly dramatic scenes. While the magnetic-looking Xzibit, as his assistant coach, barely registers on screen.

But where the film falls flat is in the script. The dialog and plotting are both painfully predictable and trite. The locker-room jingo ("bring it in, take a knee, jog it off") is as annoying as the over-reliance on irrelevant football action. Sure, there are the bones of a terrific story and vivid characters lifted right from the source documentary (we see how closely lifted they are in a closing credits clip reel). But by forcing the real events into a tired movie formula, the filmmakers squeeze the life out of it.

themes, violence, language

30.Nov.06