Sometime, probably within the next year or two, someone is going to parody The Blind Side, possibly by getting some enormous mountain of a man, maybe Michael Clarke Duncan, to stand alongside some shrewish little woman, possibly Cheri Oteri.

Rest assured that that is EXACTLY what you’ll see here in The Blind Side, but it is only what you see on the surface.

See, The Blind Side is the semi-biographical story of Michael Ohre, who started out life as the son of a drug-addict mother and eventually, by way of what appears to be a purely random meeting (or divinely inspired, depending on your bent) falls in with a family who owns a whole load of fast food restaurant franchises in and around Memphis.  Ohre works hard, studies often, and eventually defies literally astronomical odds to become a pro football player, which is, ironically, what pretty much every high school teacher in the country is trying frantically to DISSUADE the kids from aspiring to because they know just how astronomical those odds are.

Thus, using this movie to inspire children to work hard and do well in school is about like promising them that if they hit the books they too can jump off of tall buildings and fly.

This is both the high point and the low point about The Blind Side–yes, it’s inspirational.  It’s sure to get both laughs and tears out of its audience in varying degrees.  It harps relentlessly on family themes.  It almost bludgeons you with the force of its “you can do anything if you put your mind to it” theme–for crying out loud, they’ve got it etched in stone over the gates of the Christian school Ohde is sent to, except of course it’s the “with God all things are possible” approach.

It’s such a cookie-cutter kind of movie, literally all the elements of a “sports movie” are here, and it would almost be parody if they just took it a BIT farther, but it doesn’t distract from the fact that it works.    Calling this a bad movie requires incredible intestinal fortitude, and not even I can bring myself to call this bad.  Tired, yes. Predictable, oh yes.  The BLIND can see this movie coming.  There is absolutely nothing new here except that a few nouns have changed.

But again, this doesn’t distract from the fun, the laughs, and of course, the inspirational value.  It’s as tired as a dodged question on Capitol Hill, it’s as predictable as a horse race between Secretariat and a horse with no legs, and it will make you feel like a total jerk if you try and call it BAD.

The Screenhead Ten Scale acknowledges that it does what it does supremely well, but questions if it should have been done at all because it’s been done so many times before, and thus hands it a six out of ten.