(2009) "Hope for courage and try for honor." Homeless, sleeping on a couch in Tony Hamilton's home, Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron) gets admitted to Wingate Christian School in Memphis after Tony makes a plea to Coach Cotton (Ray McKinnon) for his own son and Big Mike. "You don't admit Michael Oher because of sports," Coach Cotton says to the private school's board of Christians: "You admit him because it's the right thing to do."

However, in order to participate in athletics, Mike must demonstrate ability as a student first. According to his test scores, Mike has an IQ of 80, an impoverished reading level, and little academic aptitude; but one of his teachers realizes that he absorbs content adequately in class and can communicate satisfactorily through oral responses: "Big Mike is not stupid."

No longer living with the Hamiltons, Mike collects popcorn refuse in the bleachers after games and sleeps in the gym. The night before Thanksgiving as he's walking in the cold without a jacket, Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock) and her husband Sean (Tim McGraw, who sings the final song during the end credits), who owns 85 fast-food franchises, offer to take him into their luxurious home for the night; their young son SJ (Jae Head) has already made friends with the large African-American.

Devoted to charity work, Leigh Anne takes Mike shopping for new clothes. From the couch Mike moves into a bedroom with a bed, the first he's ever slept in of his own. While complimenting her on her generosity toward someone without other means of getting ahead, Leigh Anne's female friends also ask her if she's dealing with a "white guilt thing" and if she isn't worried about her teenage daughter Collins (Lilly Collins).

In a bookstore Leigh Anne finds SJ and Collins reading Where the Wild Things Are and Ferdinand to Mike, whom they've come to regard as the gentle bull. Among all the test scores in Michael's file, one stands out: 98 percentile in protective instincts.

With his improved grades, Michael begins football practice in the spring and a training regimen under SJ's direction. Looking into Michael's records (his mother, a drug addict, has had at least a dozen children by as many men) - Sean says of Michael, who's unwilling to talk about his past, that he's "mad at no one and he really doesn't care what happened in the past." - the wealthy couple decide to become Michael's legal guardians.

On the football field, the gentle bull (the only black player) requires Leigh Anne's exhorting him to treat the quarterback and other members of the team as if they were her and the family to be protected at all costs.

When colleges come calling to recruit Michael, the Tuohys hire Miss Sue (Kathy Bates) to tutor him to meet the NCAA's 2.5 GPA to be eligible. After Michael accepts an athletic scholarship from Ole Miss, an NCAA investigation opens to determine whether or not Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy, both alumni of the university, had an ulterior purpose in steering Michael into choosing their alma mater.

With some editing (removing the violent scene of Michael's making a visit to a drug gang in the projects and Leigh Anne's warning him that she would castrate him if he gets a girl pregnant) director/screenwriter John Lee Hancock's film - adapted from Michael Lewis's nonfiction book of Michael Oher, who was a first-draft pick in the NFL in 2009 - could become an entertaining, family-friendly Hallmark TV movie.

Click here for links to places to buy or rent this movie in video and/or DVD format, or to buy the soundtrack, posters, books, even used videos, games, electronics and lots of other stuff. I suggest you shop at least two of these places before buying anything. Prices seem to vary continuously. For more information on this film, click on this link to The Internet Movie Database. Type in the name of the movie in the search box and press enter. You will be able to find background information on the film, the actors, and links to much more information.

Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

Patrick Ivers can be reached via e-mail at .