The Blind Side Review

November 20, 2009 by Brendan
Filed under: Movie News, Movie Reviews

In The Blind Side, Quinton Aaron stars as Michael Oher, a young man born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee to a crack addict mother and a father who disappeared soon after his birth. He grew up moving from school to school, at times homeless and extremely uneducated. At the age of 18, despite his dreadful situation, Oher was admitted into a private school when the coach of the football team took note of his 6′4″ 300 lb. frame. A couple with a daughter and son who attended the same school also became familiar with Oher and he was subsequently invited to stay one night at their lavish Memphis home. Somehow that night turned into legal adoptation (not right away but down the road). The Tuohy’s treated Michael like a son, giving him a bedroom, buying him clothes, encouraging his growth in football and connecting him with a tutor to help with his studies. The tutor helped — Oher was able to improve his grade point average from 0.9 to 2.52. Joining the football team helped too — Oher went on to play for the University of Mississippi and eventually became a first round pick of the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens. The boy who grew up uneducated, homeless and with no family is now the starting offensive right tackle for the Ravens. He has also recently signed a 5-year, $13.8 million dollar contract. Not too shabby if you ask me.

The Blind Side tells us the remarkable story of Michael Oher, with a little Hollywood added into the mix. Besides Quinton Aaron, the movie also stars Sandra Bullock, Tim McGraw and Kathy Bates and features appearances by Nick Saban, Lou Holtz and a handful of other U.S. college football coaches with whom I have to admit, I am not too familiar.

This is the second underdog sports movie based on a true story that has been directed by John Lee Hancock. In 2002 he gave us The Rookie, starring Dennis Quaid and based on the story of Jim Morris, a 35-year old high school coach who tried out for Major League Baseball’s Tampa Bay Devil Rays and ended up making the team. I remember seeing that movie and thinking it was an inspiring story but the movie was just okay.

I pretty much felt the same way after seeing The Blind Side — the story itself is quite remarkable but the movie is just okay. I’ve read insinuations online that Sandra Bullock delivers an Oscar-worthy performance as the headstrong Leigh Anne Tuohy but there is no way she will even get consideration. I like Bullock as an actress but there was nothing special with what she did in this movie. The same can be said for the entire cast. No one sets the world on fire. I’m sure Quinton Aaron does a fine job at portraying what Michael Oher was really like as a young man but most of his time is spent not saying anything. Considering the movie is about Oher, we actually learn very little about the person himself. Jae Head, the young boy who plays S.J. Tuohy, is one of the most annoying little buggers I have seen in a movie in a long time. I’m sure if Lou Holtz was sitting in a room with Michael Oher trying to convince him to attend South Carolina and S.J. Tuohy was piping in that part of the deal would be for S.J. to run on the field with the team, I would guess that Mr. Holtz would probably be in jail right now for first-degree murder. You know how sometimes in a movie a giant will sit down and discover later that he unknowingly sat on a cat? I was hoping Michael Oher would do that to S.J….

Even as a sports movie, there really is very little sport in the film. The movie runs around 2 hours and out of that, there might be around 20 minutes of actual football — maybe less. During that 2 hours, it does seem to drag at times. Perhaps a little editing could have done the movie some good. Some of that S.J. stuff could have hit the editing room floor. Like the scenes with him teaching Oher how to play football — pretty painful to watch if you ask me. It was almost like an extended commercial for Under Armour.

In the end, although I find the Michael Oher story to be nothing short of phenomenal, The Blind Side just adds a bit too much of the Hollywood formula to it. Some of the lines you may hear throughout the movie are your typical Hollywood lines. Some of the characters are the typical Hollywood stock characters — like the redneck Southern football fan or the Memphis-belle socialite. Picture how you think they would look and what you think they would say and that is exactly how it is in the movie.

Is it possible that Leigh Anne Tuohy walked onto a high school practice field and basically took over the football team for a brief moment in time? Did this same woman really drive into the projects of Memphis and tell a gun-toting gangster that he better not cross into her side of town? Did a 12-year old S.J. Tuohy really sit in negotiations with Nick Saban and Lou Holtz and lay out how things were going to be between the college and Michael Oher? Do they really serve popcorn and soda at a girls high school volleyball game? I don’t know how any of this could be even remotely true. It was all just too nice and cute for me. Besides all that, it seemed to me that the Michael Oher story had very little of Michael Oher. Sure he was on the screen for about 90% of the movie but how did he feel about his life at the time? What was Michael thinking? The Blind Side didn’t do a good job of letting us know. There wasn’t enough depth to the most important character. As I said before, it’s a great story. The only problem with this movie is it only does an okay job of telling it. (6.5 out of 10)