Ultimately, Men of Honor is sunk by its own melodramatic falseness, and it stands as a well-meaning yet lacking tribute to a courageous man.
Men of Honor (2000)
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Reviews Counted:101
Fresh:42
Rotten:59
Average Rating:5.3/10
Consensus: De Niro and Goodings Jr. manage to turn in performances that make this by-the-numbers inspirational movie watchable.
Runtime: 2 hrs 23 mins
Genre: Dramas
Synopsis:
Carl Brashear lets nothing stand in the way of his dreams. The son of a Kentucky sharecropper, Carl leaves home for what he expects would be a better life. "Never quit ... be the best," his father...
Carl Brashear lets nothing stand in the way of his dreams. The son of a Kentucky sharecropper, Carl leaves home for what he expects would be a better life. "Never quit ... be the best," his father had told him, and Carl takes those words to heart.
After he joins the newly-integrated Navy, Carl spends two years writing a hundred letters before the service accepts his application for its Dive School program. Carl's training officer, Billy Sunday, wants no part of Carl or his ambitions. Sunday, a celebrated Master Chief Navy Diver whose exploits as a troublemaker are as legendary as his accomplishments as a diver, relentlessly taunts and challenges Carl, expecting him to falter and quit. But Carl has other ideas. His goal is clear, his determination fixed. Nothing will stand in the way of his dream of becoming a Navy Diver. Not even Billy Sunday.
Years later, after Carl suffers a crippling injury, he and Sunday unexpectedly join forces. Never one to turn down an opportunity to flout the system, the rebellious senior officer helps Carl buck Navy bureaucracy, overcome the loss of a leg, and go on to make military history. By the time he retires, Carl earns the esteemed titles of Master Diver and Master Chief, the Navy's highest rank for an enlisted man.
Starring: Robert De Niro, Cuba Gooding, Charlize Theron, Hal Holbrook
Starring: Robert De Niro, Cuba Gooding, Charlize Theron, Hal Holbrook, David Keith, Michael Rapaport, Powers Boothe
Director: George Tillman
Director: George Tillman
Screenwriter: Scott Marshall Smith
Producer: Robert Teitel, Bill Badalato
Composer: Mark Isham
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Reviews for Men of Honor
The movie is educational and upstanding, a little overacted and more than a little overdramatized. But it's honorable.
An inspiring, must-see movie-going experience that will have audiences cheering in their seats.
It's a real shame that instead of investigating the era's racism, Men of Honor just paints broad strokes.
A gripping, inspirational tale about human nature overcoming its own worse traits again -- barely.
There's something refreshing about its utterly unembarrassed embrace of the familiar.
It's hard to sit through Men of Honor without being pulled out of the story by the nagging feeling that creative license runs wild and unchecked throughout this blatantly fictionalized screenplay.
The movie is an old-fashioned biopic, and I mean that as a compliment.
in the spirit of the Energizer bunny ... Cuba just keeps going and going and going.
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