Ben Affleck’s loss proves to be Josh Lucas’ gain in “Glory Road,” a slickly formulaic Disney sports drama in which Lucas ended up replacing Affleck in the starring role. It’s the biggest part Lucas has had to date, and he instantly owns it.
As the relentless Texas Western basketball coach, Don Haskins, who led the partly African-American Miners team to victory in the mid-1960s, Lucas comes across as a punishing cheerleader, drilling discipline into his handpicked team. Booze, women and late nights are strictly off-limits, and if you don’t believe it, Haskins is ready and willing to provide you with a ticket home and a packed suitcase.
In his fierce locker-room pep talks, he cajoles, terrorizes, preaches the virtues of “fundamental basketball,” and ultimately wills his team into victory. Lucas does his best to make the character compelling and credible. In a better movie, he might have succeeded.
James Gartner, the first-time director of “Glory Road,” isn’t content just to tell a story. At the outset, the movie announces that this is “the team that changed everything.” Yes, “everything.” The closing credits claim that their final upset was the most important event in the history of college basketball.
But in the end their victory is less inspiring than, say, the less heralded underdog triumph in “Hoosiers,” a better basketball movie that doesn’t traffic so gleefully in clichés. For one thing, “Hoosiers” doesn’t make its women nearly invisible.
Gartner and his writers barely allow Haskins’ wife to exist, and the same is true for the other women who briefly turn up. The movie has as little use for them as Haskins does. Whenever Haskins sees one of his players with a female, he starts ranting about the “nonsense” of romance. When he moves his family into a college dormitory, his wife’s confused reaction is barely acknowledged.
For period flavor, Gartner throws Buddy Holly and “The Ballad of the Green Berets” on the soundtrack, but it takes him half the film to discover the subject that is most directly tied to the 1960s: the American apartheid that makes it all but impossible for the team to find lodgings, eat in restaurants and visit a restroom without being beaten.
The chief villain is a racist coach, Adolph Rupp (Jon Voight), whose Kentucky team provides a special challenge to Haskins’ boys. Rupp’s wife, who carefully announces that she’s no bigot, has even less screen time than Haskins’ mate.
One of the writers, Gregory Allen Howard, worked on another pair of sports movies, “Ali” and “Remember the Titans,” and unfortunately it shows. What the script needs is a writer who can rethink this material, freshen it, refuse to Disneyfy it. But since the producer is Jerry Bruckheimer (“Armageddon,” “Bad Boys”), well, that’s not going to happen.
“Glory Road” is not without its charms. The locker-room interplay between the teammates has some wit, Derek Luke communicates great charm as the team’s star, and Lucas fans will be happy to see him taking the leading role for a change.