Men of Honor: Movie Review, DVD Review

(Originally published 2000)

Directed by George Tillman Jr., written by Scott Marshall Smith, 128 minutes, rated R.

At the core of George Tillman Jr.'s "Men of Honor" is the moving, true story of a black man overcoming racism in the recently desegregated U.S. Navy of 1948.

If this were the gritty, harder-hitting Hollywood of the early 1970s, a time when directors and writers didn't feel today's enormous pressures to make a killing at the box office, that alone would have given audiences reason to attend. But now, in the less-truthful, whitewashed, feel-good climate of the new millennium, in which movies about racism have become soaked in the earning power of sentimentality, it should only raise a yellow flag of caution.

"Men of Honor" is exactly the type of story today's Hollywood loves to get its hands around and strangle with formula--not to mention with a score that tells us exactly how to feel during pivotal moments of the film. Indeed, composer Mark Isham’s soaring strings and blaring trumpets present a drippy guidebook of emotions that instructs audiences when to weep, when to get angry, when to be joyous, when to be outraged.

It’s a sort of slumming for sadness and laughs that isn’t just insulting to audiences, but more to the point, to the life the film is allegedly trying to honor: Carl Brashear (Cuba Gooding Jr.), a poor Kentucky sharecropper's son who became the U.S. Navy's first African-American master diver.

As the film showcases with all the subtlety of a jackhammer, Brashear's military life was hardly a bed of medals; when he first arrives at the Bayonne, N.J., diving school, none of the enlisted men will bunk with him, and his diving instructor, the sneering military stereotype Billy Sunday (Robert De Niro), reveals himself to be a cruel bigot determined to make certain he fails.

Thus begins Brashear's fight to prove his worthiness to himself, to the Navy, to his people, and to Sunday--an important story and a noteworthy piece of history that may have actually happened, but which is so watered down with predictability and sap, the film ultimately doesn't honor Brashear at all.

Grade: C-

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