“42″ My rating: B (Opening wide on April 12)
128 mintues | MPAA rating: PG-13
The race-redefining rise of Jackie Robinson from the Negro Leagues to the long-segregated majors is the best American sports story ever.
So I wish I could report that the new movie “42” is among the greatest sports movies ever.
It isn’t.
Oh, it’s not a bust. Newcomer Chadwick Boseman gives a star-making performance as the young Jackie and the picture establishes an authentic sense of time and place. It shows all the racist b.s. Robinson had to put up with as the first black man to play in Major League Baseball.
It’s just that this effort from writer/director Brian Helgeland (whose resume runs from penning the screenplay for “L.A. Confidential” to directing the brutal noir thriller “Payback”) is is generally effective but rarely inspired. It’s so sincere and straightforward that artistry hardly figures into the equation.
Helgeland clearly wanted his movie to bring Robinson’s story to a younger generation that most likely never heard of the Dodgers’ No. 42. He hasn’t dumbed things down, exactly, but it’s a conservative approach — more a teaching moment than a fully-committed cinematic immersion.
The movie does a good job of delivering the sailiant points of the Jackie Robinson legend, but overall it’s a cautious movie, one that goes out of its way to be nonthreatening, to hold the young viewers’ hands, to guide them through a world they are ignorant of or have avoided learning about.
The film boils down to a conspiracy between two men.
