It was Oscar Wilde who once commented that ""All bad poetry is sincere."" If he were alive today, he might add that all bad feel-good sports movies are sincere, too. ""Pride,"" about James Ellis' (Terrence Howard) African-American swim team in Philadelphia, is as sincere as any of the poets Oscar Wilde was undercutting. And it's just as bad. Good God is this movie boring. It's formulaic, tepid and its aesthetic poverty strips it of any potential affect. ""Pride's"" emotional intelligence is derived not from any great civil rights literature, but from The Wonderful World of Disney's vault of race-related movies.
""Pride"" obviously cares about civil rights and is inspired by Ellis' story. But that alone is not saying much. There is nothing more off-putting than a formulic movie about a crucial issue, and ""Pride"" misses the point completely. Apparently the writers discarded everything unique about their source material, leaving only those events which fit the formula (why even tell a true story then?).
The resulting storyline is not principally inspired by how Ellis built an inner-city swim team from scratch and rejuvenated an economically-devastated community. Instead, the movie spends most of its time showing us that Ellis gave his swimmers many motivational speeches, apparently accompanied by music more inspiring than he was. Those are not the same thing, and this we should be honest about (and this reviewer's bet, incidentally, is that Ellis' actual speeches were far more insightful than the banal platitudes of ""Pride"").
There is no coherent story arc either. The young swimmers who perform poorly at their first meet are harshly lectured by Ellis and then suddenly become state-of-the-art swimmers. There is no sense to how this happened, or why. In ""Remember the Titans""—an excellent film about race and sports—Denzel Washington's athletes improved as they grew to accept each other. ""Pride"" is less clear and thus less powerful. We're not sure at the end whether Ellis' swimmers work their hearts out in the name of racial dignity, or because they want to save their city's recreational center. Is the final victory a victory for black athletes or the Philadelphia Department of Recreation? Cynicism is unhealthy, but here goes: Maybe the filmmakers don't care, so long as there's a happy ending.
Yet despite being so distractingly formulaic, ""Pride"" at least retains the pure joy for its audience of watching Terrence Howard on screen. And that's a substantial ""at least,"" really. Howard came out of nowhere two years ago; in many ways he is the perfect actor. His lead performance as the pimp and amateur rapper in ""Hustle and Flow"" was a devastating tour de force, comparable to Marlon Brando's work in ""On the Waterfront."" Here he tries monstrously hard to seize every opportunity for a good performance, and there are a couple scenes of creative interplay between him and Bernie Mac (playing the swim club owner). That is about it, though.
In the end, it's always marvelous to watch a furious master sculptor at work, even if he's just sculpting Styrofoam and knows he can't get anywhere. If ""Pride"" is Terrence Howard's Styrofoam—and it is—he does what he can with it and we're appreciative. ""Hustle and Flow"" is his fine Elgin Marble and could never get old; ""Pride"" falls apart before it's over.
