The Stain Of Dishonor

n a year when Spike Lee makes perhaps his most incendiary challenge towards racial discourse with Bamboozled-and is once again panned and dismissed for it-Hollywood chokes up sugar-coated, bleary-eyed fare like Remember The Titans and now Men of Honor. The movie provides another motivational pill about triumph over institutionalized adversity, and it's more needlessly long and mercilessly humorless. The life story of Master Diver Carl Brashear-the first black man to attain this highest rank in the Navy, and with a prosthetic leg, to boot-is inspiring, sure. But why do honor and triumph over adversity have to be so damn boring?

Cuba Gooding, Jr. assumes the standard Denzel Washington role of Brashear, but where Washington's stone-jawed intensity is a magnetic force onscreen, Gooding sticks with a wide-eyed, boyish eagerness that never quite grows into the dignity and self-assurance needed for the role. Carl, driven simply by his need to "be the best," raises himself out of his father's sharecropping, up through a discriminatory diving school and onto one leg after he's injured during a nuclear-weapon recovery. Scott Marshall Smith's bland script turns what could have been an interesting character study of a man who defied an adverse military institution into a much less complex conflict between Brashear and an invented oppositional figure: Robert DeNiro as redneck veteran diver Billy Sunday, caricatured right down to the obligatory drill-sergeant-barks-at-trainees scene with the "I AM God" line. It's obvious that DeNiro's part has been written in-captivating though he is, his character's presence is clichéd and unnecessary.

Charlize Theron and Michael Rapaport get about an inch of dialogue each as Sunday's bleary-eyed wife and Brashear's white Bubba Gump, respectively. Apparently, director George Tillman, Jr. couldn't find any more room for them in this overlong, humorless yawner. It's too bad, because by the time Brashear's most challenging hurdle comes along, Men of Honor's dubious point has been made several times over, and it's very ready to be tossed out like a Hallmark card.