CodeBreakers

Reviewed by:
Larry Dobrow

In the 14 months since its first original movie aired, ESPN's cinematic output has veered between high-minded understatement (its chronicle of Roger Bannister's quest for the four-minute mile) to I-love-you-pa! mawkishness (its Dale Earnhardt Jr. biopic). CodeBreakers, which soberly recounts the 1951 West Point cheating scandal that gutted Army's football team, falls somewhere in between. While the movie works quite well as a morality play—guy sells out his best-buddy roommate in the name of honor, yada yada—it boasts all the subtlety and dramatic nuance of Stuart Scott recapping the day's NBA action. (Boo-yah!) It's not merely enough to foreshadow the protagonist's decision to violate the school's honor code; no, CodeBreakers opens with a shot of a blackboard bearing the message "You Have to Pay the Price," lasers in on a crisply uniformed officer announcing that "the honor code is the pride of the Corps," and captures Scott Glenn's grizzled coach repeatedly intoning, "If I thought somebody on this team was dirty, I'd give him a sponge bath myself…a sexy sponge bath!" (OK, not really). CodeBreakers attempts to cover an awful lot of ground in its 90-odd minutes, and that's before it tacks on a romantic subplot and not one, but two complicated father/son relationships. As a result, the flick never quite illustrates just how much was at stake for either the characters or the institution, thus relegating it to movie-of-the-week mediocrity.

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