Movie Review: Pride (2007)

Stars: 5 out of 5
Pros: Inspiring story brought to life by great actors

Cons: Poor attempt to build suspense at the climax; "s" word

The Bottom Line:

True swimming story

Inspires, encourages

You need to watch it

Pride, Determination, and Resilience.  But You Have to Earn the Pride.

Jim Ellis (Terrence Howard) loves to swim. During the 60's, he joined his schools swim team, which created problems. Jim is African American, and the white competitors in North Carolina weren't happy to be competing against him.

10 years later, Jim has landed in Philadelphia. Despite his credential to teach math, the only job he can get is cleaning out the recreation center in the poor part of town. It's scheduled to be torn down soon. The only person inside the building is maintenance man Elston (Bernie Mac). The closest anyone else comes to it is playing basketball outside.

That changes one day when the basketball hoops are taken down in the march toward tearing down the center. As five of the guys stand there fuming about the loss of the hoops, Jim invites them in to use the pool.

Slowly, Jim gains their trust and begins to teach them the fundamentals of swimming. They gain enough skill to ask to go to a meet, hoping to meet women. But do five men and one woman really have the skills to compete against all male teams who have been training for years?

Okay, let's get the obvious out of the way first. This is an underdog sports movie featuring kids from a bad neighborhood. The neighborhood even comes complete with its own bully/thug/criminal leader who has influence with some of the kids. As a result, there's nothing we haven't seen here before.

So, is the movie worth seeing? Absolutely.

As is always needed for a film like this to succeed, you need to become attached to the characters. Right from the prologue, I felt for Jim. Since the movie is mostly focused on him, that makes it easy to get caught up in the action. We don't really get to know much about any of the kids, but the little we do know makes us root for them as well.

The acting is great. Terrence Howard is absolutely believable as Jim. His drive to reach the kids comes through in every scene. I'll admit I'm not a huge Bernie Mac fan, but he did a great job as well. While he did offer a little bit of comic relief, this was a fairly serious role, and he rose to the occasion. Tom Arnold plays a rival coach. The closest to a villain in the piece, he does a great job with the little screen time he has. The other standout is Kimberly Elise who plays one of the swimmer's older sister.

The movie sets out to inspire, and it does. Some in the audience cheered the ending, and I sure felt like it. I did need to wipe my eyes watching the final few minutes.

A minor complaint I have is the needless slowing down of the climax. The film slows two of the swimmers in the final race way down to build suspense. And I do mean way down. It was beyond laughable.

My bigger complaint was the language. There are a handful of uses of the "s" word over the course of the film. That surprised me since the movie was rated PG. There are also a few racial epithets throw around.

When you go to watch an "Inspired by a true story" movie, you pretty much know what you are getting. But if you are in the mood for one, Pride is a great one to see.