In 1961, Syracuse University senior and running back Ernie Davis became the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy. He died of leukemia two years later at age 23. This routine biopic is based on Robert Gallagher’s 1999 book “Ernie Davis: The Elmira Express.” Neither director Gary Fleder (”Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead,” “Impostor”) nor University of Chicago grad Charles Leavitt (”K-PAX,” “Blood Diamond”) appear inspired by their assignment. Jackie Robinson and Jim Brown inspired Davis, who in turn inspired later black athletes. But the black kids bussed to a preview screening of “The Express” sounded uninspired. Rob Brown (”Finding Forrester,” “Stop-Loss”) plays Davis with little inflection. Dennis Quaid plays coach Ben Schwartzwalder with little distinction. As a period piece, “The Express” studiously details the white racism that Davis outran, but it bores as a rote tale of sports uplift. Local location spotters will see some U of C interiors used nicely. With Charles S. Dutton, Aunjanue Ellis, Elizabeth Shivers, Clancy Brown Saul Rubinek, Nelsan Ellis and Nicole Beharie. (Bill Stamets)

Producer Ice Cube extends his line of family-friendly entertainment. With three multi-film series to his credit, the former rapper now plays Curtis Plummer, a laid-off factory worker. His sister-in-law Claire (Tasha Smith), a waitress working an extra shift at the local diner, wants him to look after her 11-year-old daughter Jasmine (Keke Palmer, from Robbins, Illinois, and “Akeelah and the Bee.”) “She too weird and moody for me,” he complains, but $5 an hour is the only paycheck in sight. Jasmine is a bookworm and admires Tyra Banks. Her dream is to be a model. Curtis, a former high-school football quarterback, mentors his niece and she stars on the team, which goes to Miami for a national championship. Nick Santora’s original screenplay, rewritten by Doug Atchison (also of “Akeelah and the Bee”), is based on the true story of the 11-year-old girl who did play quarterback for the Harvey, Illinois Colts and played in the Pop Warner League. Along the way, Curtis cleans up his act, gets hired as a coach, and courts Jasmine’s teacher. Curtis’ brother and Jasmine’s long-gone father show up, but Jasmine has found a fit father figure. This heartwarming script is directed by Fred Durst (“The Education of Charlie Banks”), but the rocker of Limp Bizkit fame flunks for the use of terribly trite music. The costumes and cinematography feel true to an economically dispirited small-town. With Matt Craven, Jill Marie Jones, Garrett Morris, Glenn Plummer, Michael Colyar and Earthquake. 94m. (Bill Stamets)

RECOMMENDED

Adam Yauch is such a nicer name than “Nathaniel Hornblower,” the nom de zoom the lead Beastie Boy has used on music videos and the assembly of fan-shot footage that became the feature “Awesome! I Fuckin’ Shot That!” Yauch also has the fine fortune to be able to foot his own production and distribution concern, Oscilloscope Laboratories. To boot, he’s not a bad filmmaker, not a bad filmmaker at all. The breezy “Gunnin’ For That #1 Spot” follows eight high school basketball players competing in something called the “Elite 24 Game” at Harlem’s Rucker’s Park in Harlem. While Yauch doesn’t develop his subjects as characters, he’s got a more-kinetic-than-ESPN esthetic in his back pocket.  (Ray Pride) 

By Ray Pride

“Pink is the navy blue of India.”

That’s one of the better-known epigrams of the late, compulsively pulse-taking fashion editor Diana Vreeland. An observation that washed over me after leaving a Thursday night preview of “Speed Racer” in IMAX: this thundering puppy is rife with cultural references and multiple languages and bursting design details that should make it appeal to a broad cross-section of the moviegoing world. (Including India, which could take the great washes of pink as more holy than girly.)

Or at least it seemed that way until the weekend, when the opening worldwide grosses seemed to suggest that all those potentially intrigued audiences would not be dragged screaming and spending into the theater. (There’s no way they could already have known about the repugnant tubby little brother and his gum-baring chimpanzee sidekick.)

In their first directorial effort since ending “The Matrix” trilogy—“V for Vendetta” was shepherded by their longtime second James McTeigue—the Chicago-born Wachowski brothers dig deep into the traditions and stylistics of anime and their own cultural toy box to create a bold yet somehow hermetic movie with fantastically intricate design and technique that somehow seems not to fall into any known demographic. (Plus, Emile Hirsch, who plays Speed in his first role since “Into the Wild,” fired his agents on Monday, a kind of review without words.) “Deliciously aggravating” would be a compliment in my devil’s dictionary, but I doubt it would send anyone to the Cineplex door. While there were jokes from the elder heights of film cricketry about sugar rushes and candy coatings and epileptic fits, “Speed Racer” is a less-than-obliterating experience. Noisy and bursting with eyeball kicks, “Speed Racer” is a Ritalin-deprived formalist treat, sort of like David LaChappelle compositions brought to asexual life. (First reviews made a lot of candy and cereal metaphors, so let’s not fail the assignment by noting that the bold color palette is often like Fruit Loops in a morphine drip. “Futurama” on a mild dose of LSD?)

But there aren’t that many formalism-oriented, technique-loving viewers, it seems, near the 3,850 locations in North America, who might appreciate, say, such iconic-unironic elements as the Wachowskis’ use of a digital “wipe” across the screen, making transitions by passing close-ups of characters from right to left, much in the way that layers of cels function in traditional sorts of film animation. (Imagine the characters in low-budget TV-made series like the original “Speed Racer” or “Johnny Quest” forever moving across planes rather than into and out of the perceived “ground” of the screen.)

More bits: the opening credits for Warner Bros., co-financier Village Roadshow and Silver Pictures are festooned with Oskar Fischinger-style bursts of geometric animation (the sprightliest logo-damage since the neon bars slashing the logos at the front of “Oceans 13.”) The impossibly blue skies in the early flashbacks are the blue of a Benadryl commercial in CGI heaven. The detestable boy-tubby little brother, Spritle, is seen in Paul Frank monkey pajamas while the one-note chimpanzee, Chim-Chim, wears similar flannel pjs with a boy’s head on them. The blend of hyper-saturated green against red, impossible in strictly photochemical terms, is as lush as that contrast in “Amelie.” A brassy exclamation of “Omigod! Was that a ninja?!” matches the self-consciously unselfconscious “Oh, that kid is wily.” (And I would like to visit the unlikely “Aqueducts of Sassicaia” to find how intoxicating its waters might be.)

As in “Fight Club” and a few other recent pictures, “Speed Racer” is also a deca-million-dollar fable about how corporations can stifle creativity—“That’s because the sponsors control the media!” The mixed message has its charm; while Motorola walkie-talkies and Cheerios get overt product placement, most of the brands on view are keening gibberish, towering neon monuments in more alphabets and languages than I could recognize, and there are myriad appearances by announcers and characters speaking languages other than English. It seems less a commercial strategy by the Wachowskis as a philosophical one: to incorporate as many forms of communication and color-blind ethnicity as possible, much as they did with the “Matrix” pictures. There are other oddities, including a bribe-by-plushie interlude that seems more adult than some of the movie’s dispensable bumbling gangster caricatures. The Racer X character is also given an eccentric late passage of explaining the positive aspects of his radical identity-assignment surgery to his younger brother.

“It’s a whole new world, baby, it’s a whole new world,” sounds self-congratulatory out of the mouth of a character after the gravitationally impossible yet beautifully stitched final race, yet there are elements of technique here that will be as influential, to the right crew members of future films, as the infernal “bullet time” effect of “The Matrix.” Whether or not “Speed Racer” makes its financiers’ money back, it’s still going to be more influential than any undiscerning reviewer realizes.

“Speed Racer” is now playing in 35mm and IMAX.