Any Hollywood movie that begins with the phrase 'based on a true story' is knowingly practicing false advertising. While the key word is always 'based,' the filmmakers know it's the word 'true' that will send the hearts of its audience aflutter. It is the thrill of watching something that really happened, even though it's portrayed with actors and written lines of dialogue and musical underscoring. Such accoutrements are exponentially squared in a film produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, a man who never met a story he couldn't drown in excess. What makes Remember the Titans intriguing on its face is the man behind the camera, Boaz Yakin, who may be the most individualistic director Bruckheimer has ever tried to homogenize. Yakin made his searing debut with Fresh, a different sort of inner-city melodrama in which chess and the wiles of a boy held center stage with drugs, guns and gangs.（）

　　 Remember the Titans, while by no means a different sort of sports movie, takes a more benign look at the state of race in America. The year is 1971, the morning after the Civil Rights movement, when an all-black and an all-white high school have been integrated in Alexandria, West Virginia. Since we're talking about a working-class football town, the school year truly begins not with classes, but on the first day of football camp. In comes Herman Boone (Denzel Washington), a tough-as-nails coach from South Carolina hired by the white establishment to appease the black contingent of their new school system, thus relegating kindly coach Bill Yoast (Will Patton) to an assistant position. It is up to Boone to unite the mixed races that make up his team and coaching staff in order to produce a winner.

　　 The first thing that should be said about Remember the Titans is that it is a terrific entertainment, staged with a degree of conviction that often approaches the giddy. Yakin thankfully loses the oppressive blues and oranges favored by Bruckheimer director-pawns in favor of earthier, softer tones, and that softness extends to the characterizations. The script by Gregory Allen Howard assiduously avoids the pitfall of allowing racism to be embodied by an evil few; racism here is more subtly widespread, more softly ingrained within people slowly making the adjustment in the post-Civil Rights era. Yakin and Howard have some fun with this notion (their new white neighbors first mistake the Boones for movers), and they also explore it through the football microcosm. How deeply they explore it is another question, one that points back to Hollywood's relationship to 'true stories.' Is it true that the players were for the most part able to resolve their differences and see their sameness? Were most of those tensions resolved with little more than a good and heartfelt singalong?

　　 Since the raison d'etre of Hollywood, especially Bruckheimer's Hollywood, is to entertain at all costs, concepts such as truth often only get in the way. This particular true story happens to fit neatly inside a shopworn subgenre of Hollywood storytelling, the one about the disparately ragtag sports team that overcomes its differences and comes together in victory. The adherence to the genre overcomes any interest in being true, which paradoxically explains the inclusion of an actual event in the film's third act. Just in time for a 'win one for the Gipper' situation, a tragedy comes out of the blue, and although it really happened, its inclusion betrays that most important word in the opening promise-story. Remember the Titans is ostensibly telling a story, and this event that all but overwhelms the movie has absolutely nothing to do with the story being told and everything to do with keeping the audience involved with the cheapest sentiment. Thanks to another electric performance from Washington, uniformly strong work from the supporting players (particularly Will Patton in his rock-and-a-hard-place role), a nice selection of effective if predictable period music, and a restraint that only occasionally loses its grip, you will laugh, cry and cheer at the goings-on in Remember the Titans. But you'll probably hate yourself in the morning.