The Blind Side ( ** )

November 19, 2009 11:25 a.m. EST

126 minutes

In theaters November 20, 2009

Rtaing: PG-13, Drama

The Blind Side has blind spots.

That's why, despite the best of intentions and a few audience-pleasing grace notes, this pigskin parable gets nowhere near the end zone.

Based on the best-selling 2006 nonfiction book by Michael Lewis, The Blind Side is an inspirational drama about real-life professional football player Michael Oher, currently plying his trade for the Baltimore Ravens.

Sandra Bullock and Tim McGraw play Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy, an affluent couple who take in Oher, played by Qunton Aaron, a burly, homeless African-American teenager from the crime-ridden projects of Memphis.

Introverted and uneducated, Michael mopes around and rarely speaks, and softly at that.

Leigh Anne is a fearless, proactive matriarch, a successful interior decorator, and an energetic socialite, while Sean is an easygoing husband, the owner of a fast-food restaurant chain, and a former star point guard for the University of Mississippi basketball team (and currently a broadcaster for the Memphis Grizzlies). They have two kids, a precocious young boy (Jae Head) and a sensitive teenage girl (Lily Collins).

The Tuohys provide a place to live for Michael, a classmate of their daughter's, and then become his adoptive family. And he ends up attending and playing for Old Miss -- no surprise there -- and thus becomes eligible for the NFL draft.

Kathy Bates play Miss Sue, the tutor who helps him prepare for college, and a handful of NCAA coaches, including Nick Saban and Lou Holtz, turn up in an extended recruiting sequence, contributing cameos so self-conscious, the football luminaries might as well be emerging from behind the curtain of a television talk show.

Director John Lee Hancock (The Alamo), who did a far superior job telling a real-life sports story in The Rookie, also wrote the screenplay, which he adapted from Lewis's The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. It's not preachy, but it is decidedly superficial, offering little in the way of psychological complexity or real dramatic tension.

Hancock does make the interestingly unconventional choice of minimalizing the on-field footage and concentrating on the family story. But, unfortunately, the execution of that thoughtful game plan doesn't live up to the impulse behind it. The Blind Side is uplifting, but in such a needlessly simplistic way that it plays more like a tale to tell children as a way of offering hope than as a chronicle of a true story. Little energy is expended on making any of the relationships or exchanges truly convincing -- whether they're based on actuality or not.

And perhaps the key moment in the film, when Leigh Anne motivates her adoptive son as a budding left tackle to protect his vulnerable quarterback by likening it to protecting her, is a writer's construct that rings false with a deafening clang.

Bullock's work, however, transcends the material and helps to place her back on solid ground with an admirable and lively star turn as a followup to her shaky (to say the least) contribution to All About Steve. Her one-two comedy-drama punch of The Proposal and The Blind Side makes 2009 a formidable year for her.

Aaron, on the other hand, although he holds his own, gets only one chance to show what he can do: in a late scene featuring an outburst that finally affords us a glimpse inside his character.

An upbeat but unpolished family sports drama, The Blind Side has nothing offensive in its story about an offensive lineman, but it still fails to holds its block.