Review of Pride (2009) by Maksim B — 07 May 2011

Inspirational sport dramas based on real events tend to succeed among the audience with their touching stories, solid performances and feel-good happy endings. Pride is set on this track too, but with its lack of sufficient emotional load and formulaic development it fails to constitute itself as something more than a Hallmark Channel-suitable movie.

Swimming is not a major sport and Pride has the hard task of involving the audience from the very beginning. Though in a controversial manner, "the Afro-American" issue is brought as an opening scene and from this moment this remains one of the major plot lines. Terrence Howard as coach Ellis is the main character involved in this plot line and his terrific performance is what keeps everyone really engaged in the story-telling.

Apart from Howard's outstanding leading role, Pride stumbles with some well-known for this genre cliches. The bad character, trying to distract the talented youngsters; the experienced, but with no hope veteran (Bernie Mac) who starts to believe again; the talented but with very difficult character young swimmer; the leading character with dark past. All those cliches may not annoy the audience, but they certainly create the feeling that Pride is just "any other sports movie".

Pride is definitely a suitable choice for a weekend evening and will not disappoint, despite the inevitable comparisons with heavy-weight deliveries such as Remember The Titans.