Men of Honor: Movie Review, DVD Review (2000)

At the core of George Tillman Jr.’s “Men of Honor” is the moving, true story of a black man overcoming racisim 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. Indeed, it’s likely the film would have been less driven by formula and more interested in the truth of the life it depicts.

But now, in the less-truthful, white-washed, feel-good climate of the new millennium, where movies about racism have become soaked in the earning power of sentimentality, it should only raise a yellow flag of caution.

To be sure, “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.

With strings soaring and trumpets blaring, Mark Isham’s score is a drippy guidebook of emotions--a connect-the-feelings map that instructs audiences when to weep, when to get angry, when to be joyous, when to be outraged.

This sort of slumming for sadness and laughs isn’t just frustrating or insulting, but, as Hollywood continues to go for the emotional jugular with thin scripts that don’t stand on their own because of poor writing or poor performances (“Remember the Titans,” “The Legend of Bagger Vance,” “Pay it Forward,” “Nurse Betty” and “Here on Earth” all come to mind), it’s a device on which directors and producers are increasingly relying.

“Men of Honor” is no exception. It pulls out all the formulaic stops to punctuate the life of Carl Brashear (Cuba Gooding Jr.), a poor Kentucky sharecropper’s son who became the U.S. Navy’s first African-American 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, 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--a setup that may have actually happened, but which is so watered down with predictability and sap, the film ultimately doesn’t honor Brashear at all.

Indeed, what it becomes is just another hopeful Hollywood blockbuster--one in desperate search of a few gold medals of its own.

Grade: C-

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