Who knew a wrestler and a rapper could come together and make one of the best feel good movies of the year? No one, that’s who. Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson and Xzibit star in a collision of tear-jerking genres. Take one part sports movie and one part gang movie, stir in a death scene and a pretty girl, add some paprika, and you get Gridiron Gang. It’s like Remember The Titans in Compton, CA.

The Rock plays Sean Porter, a real-life social worker/corrections officer from Los Angeles who believes everyone deserves a second chance. He’s become fed up with seeing the same kids go in and out of his detention center then eventually jail and he decides to do something out of it. Along with his co-worker Malcolm (Mr. ‘Pimp My Ride’ himself), he attempts to put together a football team made up of teenage murderers, drug dealers, and gangbangers with hopes of raising their self-esteem and self-respect. Porter wants the kids to take their new self-worth out into the real world in order to live right and stay out of jail. It’s a crapshoot, but it can’t hurt.

Gridiron Gang takes a tired and overdone idea and gives it new life. I can count on three hands how many movies I’ve seen where a group of kids that society has given up on are taken charge by a fresh thinking role model with a goal of turning their life around. My king of run-on sentences comes with a list beginning with 1988′s Stand And Deliver and currently ends with the new release Freedom Writers starring Hilary Swank. I have seen many that have fallen short in the entertainment department, but Gridiron Gang is far from a disappointment. By the sixty-minute mark of the film, you forget about all the vitcims these kids have left in their wake and you become emotionally invested in these juvenile offenders, passionately rooting for them to succeed. If it wasn’t for my ego, I may have cried.

Buy it. Watch it with your kids. Enjoy it.  Just make sure they shield their ears from the mild language.