'The Express' (PG)(out of four)

"The Express" follows a long line of football hero movies. This one brings to mind in some ways "Brian's Song," the 1971 film starring Billy Dee Williams and James Caan, about two professional football players who establish a bond when one of them discovers he's dying.

But "The Express" tackles other subjects besides pigskin and pomp. It's also about the color of skin and how that plays into how well a star athlete can perform on and off the field, especially during the turning point of racial desegregation in the United States in the late 1950s.

Based on the true story of college football hero Ernie Davis (Rob Brown), the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy, the movie follows the two-time All-America running back for Syracuse University who led his team to the national championship in 1960. In 1961, he won his Heisman, but Davis never got the chance to play professional football; he was diagnosed with leukemia during the summer of 1962 and died nearly a year later.

The film engages moviegoers from the get-go. We meet Ernie when he's a boy in Uniontown, Pa., picking bottles on the railroad tracks. When he encounters a group of scowling white kids who are hungry for a fight, it's here we see the gifts that Ernie already possesses. He doesn’t back down from the boys despite them outnumbering him at least three to one and when he does decide to outrun them, he carries his bag of bottles like a running back going for a touchdown. See where this is going?

Ernie not only has trouble on the tracks, but his idyllic life living with a loving grandfather and grandmother is about to change when his remarried mother returns to fetch him. But the move to Elmira, N.Y., will be the start of something big as it is there he becomes the Elmira Express, a hot football commodity being courted as a high school senior to be a college football standout by the likes of Notre Dame and Syracuse University.

The school's football hero, Jim Brown, a Syracuse graduate who is on his way to the Cleveland Browns, convinces Davis that Syracuse is the school for him. Of course, the predominantly white school will be tough for him socially, but coach Ben Schwartzwalder (Dennis Quaid) said he will make it all worthwhile. While Davis believes he'll have a friend in Schwartzwalder after a congenial recruitment visit, all that changes when reality sets in. The coach's only reason to exist is to win a national championship and Davis is the one who can do it for him.

With some great football action and stellar acting by Rob Brown and his sidekick, J.B., engagingly played by Omar Benson Miller ("Miracle at St. Anna"), the movie's 2 hours and 10 minutes running time breezes by as fast as Davis running 87-yard touchdown. Charles S. Dutton, who plays the grandfather who helps young Ernie overcome his stutter and advises him on the way of the world, is his usual believable self. It's too bad he isn't given more film time.

Yet there was something disingenuous about Quaid's performance as Schwartzwalder. Perhaps it's because Quaid has taken on sports roles so frequently in his acting career that it's become difficult to tell one role from another. He's played a football player twice ("Everybody's All-American," "Any Given Sunday"), a baseball coach turned rookie player in "The Rookie," a bicyclist in "Breaking Away," and a track star in "Our Winning Season."

This time he's gray around the temples, with a gruff voice, but not a lot of depth. He plays Schwartzwalder as a one-note coach, yelling orders and not giving a hoot about his players other than the number they wear on the back of their jersey. In 1959, Time magazine wrote about the real Floyd Burdette Schwartzwalder, who died in 1993 at the age of 83, saying that "to get the most out of his boys, Drillmaster Schwartzwalder relieves the pressure of practice with some heavy-handed, country-style kidding." Quaid's Schwartzwalder, on the other hand, never kids; he barely cracks a smile.

It isn't until the very end of the film that we start to see some three dimensions of Quaid's portrayal of the winning coach, when he sheds a tear after Davis singles him out during the Heisman Trophy ceremony.

While this is a fine sports film and a worth seeing for the context in history it brings to life, its one-dimensional messages are a bit past their prime. Both gridiron heroes deserved more of a tribute. "The Express" is a winning sports film; it's just not one of the winningest.