PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 10/24/03)


Cuba Gooding, Jr. has come a long way since his ebullient Oscar-night triumph in 1997-namely, Rat Race, Snow Dogs, and Boat Trip. Radio, his latest entry into the hit parade, features Gooding, Jr. in a performance more akin to Justin Bartha in Gigli than Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. Even the usually sensible Ed Harris’ succumbs to the overwhelming burden of soggy pathos, manipulative melodrama and liberal guilt that renders Radio so much lite-FM dreck.

Wearing the corniest pair of fright teeth since Austin Powers, Gooding, Jr. toplines the film, although it’s mostly Harris’ show. His Harold Jones is the more verbal partner in the friendship between a South Carolina high school football coach and a mentally disabled local resident, dubbed "Radio" for his attachment to that particular device. Much of the film focuses on Coach Jones’ struggle to connect with the virtually mute Radio and bring him into the larger community despite the prejudice of his football players, their parents, and even the high school principal, played by Alfre Woodard. (Pause for a moment to consider the African-American Woodard, playing a female principal, in 1976 South Carolina. A lovely bit of color-blind casting, true, but nearly as improbable as the Hail Mary pass that wins one of Hanna High’s football games.)

Director Michael Tollin has a sure hand with the sequences set on the gridiron or the basketball court, although the Dolby-crunching tackles would be more at home in Any Given Sunday. His ineptness with dramatic scenes could be indulged if they weren’t so tiresome to sit through. Mike Rich’s script trots out every footsore cliché about southern manhood, lionizing Harris’ even-handedness even as it lays on the pathos with a trowel and frantically gropes for heartstrings to yank.

James Horner’s drippy score is the last insult, although a winning pastiche of ’70s tunes (the Spinners, Al Green, Stevie Wonder and Harold Melvin) goes a ways to redeem the insulin overload. In the end, Radio isn’t Gooding, Jr.’s ticket back to the A-list. Both Harris and Gooding, Jr. are fine actors trapped in a mawkish, pandering production that wastes the latter and is a waste of time for the former.

—Sara Brady