Ryan Gosling – The Magnificent 60s

Denzel Washington’s breakout movie. An odd statement given he had already appeared in such box office hits as The Pelican Brief (1993), Philadelphia (1993), and Crimson Tide (1995). But in the first two he was second banana to, respectively, Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts. And only the first topped the magical $100 million mark – though only just – the other two reaping $77 million and $91 million, respectively. But all three had considerable juice – Julia Roberts well into her stride as a box office phenomenon, the AIDs drama courting Oscars, uber-director Tony Scott helming the nuke sub drama – and backed with big marketing dollars

Apart from Washington, Remember the Titans had nothing going for it. Nobody else with any box office marquee. And covering a sport that had little traction in the U.S. and zilch in the global market. North Dallas Forty (1979) with Nick Nolte had hauled in just $26 million, The Program (1993) pairing James Caan and Halle Berry just $23 million, biopic Rudy (1994) $22 million and even the heavyweight Any Given Sunday (1999) helmed by Oscar-winning Oliver Stone and featuring Oscar-winning Al Pacino and a roster of top names could only climb to $75 million.

Remember the Titans hit $115 million, the biggest movie of Washington’s career, the biggest sports movie of all time. And here’s the kicker. None of the characters were instantly likeable. You had a ruthless hardass coach who refuses to listen to advice, the jocks are all spoiled and entitled, even the kids are likely to turn you off. But where recent pictures like Roofman (2025), Marty Supreme (2025) and After the Hunt (2025) leave you with no liking for the characters at the end, here the opposite is true.

Each character has a rival. Incoming college coach Herman Boone (Denzel Washington) has little time for the man he replaced, Bill Yoast (Will Patton). Incoming Sunshine Bass (Kip Pardue) nettles team captain Gerry Bertier (Ryan Hurst) who in turn clashes with newcomer Julius Campbell (Wood Harris). Even Yoast’s daughter refuses to play nice with Boone’s daughter.

All this plays out against a background of racism. In 1971 T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia, has been integrated, a notion largely opposed by the existing white authorities and residents, including Bertier’s mother and girlfriend (Emma) Kate Bosworth who refuses to shake a black hand. Like his daughter, Boone isn’t about to play nice and he proves to be the worst kind of driven coach, pushing his players to more demanding physical levels and punishing them when they don’t grasp his plays.

But he does understand how a team works, that it won’t function as a collection of individuals, no matter how brilliant – and the better the players like Bertier, the only All-American on the field, expect to be treated differently. Bonding, in this instance, forces black and white players to learn about each other’s lives.

And you could say the same about victory. Nothing brings a team together like winning. A successful team crosses all racial boundaries.

So we get the usual last-minute touchdowns, the individuals finding redemption on the field, the cheating and off-field maneuvers, and the “coming together” that was such a big part of Al Pacino’s team in Any Given Sunday.

Music plays a big part, as white players begin to enjoy what they initially view as black music, and as the team take music as their very own bonding exercise, dreaming up a theme song and entering the field of play with an original song-and-dance number.

Denzel Washington is the driving force and the fact that he’s not a do-gooder and is just trying do his job rather than undertaking any wider virtue-signalling remit is what propels the picture. Will Patton (Entrapment, 1999) is solid. Wood Harris (The Wire, 2002-2008) and Donald Faison (Scrubs, 2001-2010) catch the eye. Kip Pardue (Driven, 2001) was the breakout youngster and current box office behemoth Ryan Gosling has a small part.

Under the direction of Boaz Yakin (Safe, 2012), it fairly rolls along as the rivalries develop or are resolved. Written by Gregory Allan Howard (Ali, 2001).

Not a critical hit at the time and still pretty much written off by the media, but picked up a strong head of steam among audiences at the time and since.

Thoroughly enjoyable.

I could have seen this for nothing on Netflix, but instead, hoping to do an action picture justice by seeing it on the big screen, I shelled out my bucks for the privilege. Bourne Ripoff is as much as you need to know. Lazy writing with a bundle of the incongruities you can get away with within the MCU because as long as there’s the requisite action nobody bothers too much about logic.

Don’t be fooled into thinking this is John Wick gone wild. It’s many things gone wild, including a heap of overacting, and a pair of the biggest villainous klutzes you will ever come across. It’s vaguely redeemed by an explosions/ shootout/ tram chase in Vienna but that’s only enough to shift it up from one-star to two. And it’s a shame because Ryan Gosling (First Man, 2018) in his first movie for four years is a believable tough guy in the Bourne tradition and Ana de Armas delivers on the action chops she displayed in No Time to Die (2021).

*A poster straight out of the Joseph E. Levine playbook. He used to dream up these kind of posters which characters were assigned titles that bore no resemblance to the part they played on screen.*

It should be an action romp, but instead it’s a mess. A C.I.A. black ops unit – inventively called the gray department – is hiring convicted killers to knock off anyone they want. Six (Ryan Gosling) got jailed for an insane amount of time, would you believe (nope!) for, as a teenager, killing his dad who was domestically abusing both his sons (trying to drown Six, for example). Six’s latest mission is to kill a guy who turns out to be an assassin in the same line of work but who is blackmailing C.I.A. boss Carmichael (Rege-Jean Page).

There’s nothing cool about Carmichael, he throws coffee at windows when he’s cross, and that sets an awfully bad example because his underling Suzanne (Jessica Henwick) is also prone to getting very cross. But that’s nothing compared to complete nutjob Lloyd (Chris Evans) who enjoys a bit of torture and gives psychopaths a bad name, but if I got this right attended Harvard with Carmichael so that’s okay then. Lloyd is hired to kill Six because he knows too much. And Lloyd calls in other assassins.

Now we’ve had that template in Bourne so what’s going to make it different? I know, let’s ramp it up. Instead of individual assassins, who might display some kind of finesse, let’s have teams of rampaging assassins. You can’t really wreck Vienna with just an assassin or two, you need a whole army.

Danush (Avik San) is an unusual assassin in that he operates on his own, not needing a huge team, but he is also cursed by – remember he’s a ruthless assassin – being suddenly conscience-stricken.

Oh, I forgot to mention Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton), the guy who sprung Six from jail but is now retired. Luckily, he happens to have a young niece Claire (Julia Butters). And that comes in handy when Lloyd needs to bring him to heel – and can kidnap the girl. But wait, two years before, Six was assigned to protect Claire and saved her life twice.

Twice? Yep, once from assassination and once when he rushed her to hospital after something went wrong with her pacemaker. Yep, she has some terrible heart disease. But not enough apparently to prevent her being the world’s pacemaker poster girl. Guess what? She can race along the top of a castle and jump 100 feet off a castle wall into a moat.

After being blame-shamed by Carmichael, Six’s C.I.A. sidekick Dani (Ana de Armas) switches sides to help him and can be counted on to turn up to shoot darts at Lloyd and appear with a fast car in time to save Six from assassins on the aforesaid tram. But she’s one of the victims of the lazy writing. She has two clear chances to save the day by marksmanship and fails each time. The first excuse is just so dumb. Thrown a sharpshooting rifle by Six, she discovers this comes minus ammunition. “Never throw a loaded gun,” must be one of the stupidest lines ever written, a lame joke that clearly makes reference to No Time to Die. Armed with another sharpshooting device and with clear line of sight on Lloyd, for reasons that are never made clear she doesn’t shoot.

Did I mention that Six is the kind of tough guy who, armed with little more than a penknife, can saw through a water pipe because the directors want to do some kind of riff on Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014) or that this this is the thriller version of If It’s Tuesday It Must Be Belgium (1969) with a different country about every ten minutes. And if people aren’t losing digits, it’s fingernails.

Ryan Gosling and Ana de Armas come out of this well but Chris Evans (Avengers: Infinity War, 2018), with a Tom Selleck moustache, is just awful, a joke villain, the only surprise being he doesn’t twirl said moustache. It’s almost as if he’s doing his utmost to make people forget he was ever Captain Marvel, but this is to the utmost and beyond. Stick to Bridgerton would be my advice to Rege-Jean Page. Billy Bob Thornton (Bad Santa 2, 2016) plays one of his more restrained characters.

The Russo Brothers (Avengers: Infinity War) throw every trick in the book at the movie without starting from the obvious point – a decent script.

Tag: Ryan Gosling

Remember the Titans (2000) ****

The Gray Man (2022) ** – Seen at the Cinema