`Men of Honor' Tells Solid Story but Misses Mark

A lot of things go into the making of a good movie. Director George Tilman's "Men of Honor" meets more of those requirements for excellence than many big-budget Hollywood productions - but fails to meld them into a unified story.

The movie is based on the true-life story of Carl Brashear (Cuba Gooding Jr.), the first black diver in the U.S. Navy.

It more or less realistically documents his struggle to make it in a competitive field, which is made more difficult by strong race-related opposition to his success.

The filmmakers add focus to the story by creating the character of master diver Billy Sunday (Robert De Niro), who at various times serves as Brashear's role model, white supremacist oppressor and ally against military bureaucracy.

Sunday is given added depth through his own struggle, losing his ability to dive in an early scene.

De Niro's accomplished performance captures Sunday's progression from hero to tough-guy Navy trainer to drunken deserter to fighter for justice. Gooding matches De Niro with a sympathy-building portrayal of near-obsessive determination in his struggle to achieve his goals.

The film also features excellent settings, such as the at-sea U.S.S. Hoist, which creating a very believable picture of life in the Navy 40 years ago.

It even has a strong plot, as far as peacetime military movies go, which admittedly is not very far. Action scenes come about due to a barely credible series of life-threatening errors the real Navy would have avoided, leaving the viewer with a saddening estimate of the care the armed forces puts into training exercises and routine mail delivery.

Still, the basic story of Brashear's struggle is well-executed, and the addition of De Niro's character adds to, rather than detracts from, that story.

But these pluses are not enough to make "Men of Honor" a good movie. It suffers from a flawed script, which relies far too often on strong, tight-lipped silence as a response to questions.

The soundtrack fails as well. The music never adequately matches the inspirational events happening on the screen.

The film's two female characters, Brashear's wife and Sunday's wife, while competently acted by Aunjanue Ellis and Charlize Theron respectively, are not given adequate dimension.

They exist mainly to fail to understand the obsessive determination of a diver - something the audience might find itself doing as well.

And the film misses with continuity, shuffling from an opening scene in the middle of the story, to a few minutes of Brashear's childhood, to the beginning of the story, back to the middle and finally falling just short of the story's end, which is disappointingly summed up in a brief epilogue.

The Arts & Entertainment Editor

can be reached at artsdesk@unc.edu.