A mind-bogglingly sentimental ‘feelgood’ affair, in accordance with all the traditions of American sports movies, Radio stars Ed Harris (easily the film’s strongest link) as the grizzled old head coach of a high-school American-football team, way down in the deep heart of Southern redneck country. Unlike your average Carolina gridiron team, they’re fanatically followed by a severely retarded local black man who brings a radio to every game, earning him the imaginative nickname Radio, and his devotion to the cause even survives a semi-lynching where several players tie him up and lock him in a room.
Despite general suspicion and the mountain of negative repercussions his presence causes, the coach’s enlightened sense of humanity persuades him to adopt the perfectly pleasant Radio as the team’s unofficial cheerleader-cum-mascot (something like a retarded version of Manolo, the obese Spaniard whose drum has followed his national football team to the ends of the earth). This, of course, is a case that calls for Jerry Maguire’s Cuba Gooding Jr., long since established as the most willing Uncle Tom figure among Hollywood’s black actors, and he outdoes himself with a spectacular display of tics, twitches, mutters, mumbles and facial contortions, all played to the gallery for maximum ‘ahhh’ effect.
For all I know, Gooding Jr. will probably bag another Oscar for this ‘penetrating portrayal of mental subnormality’ – in reality, he’s just hamming it up shamelessly like one of the goons from the Black & White Minstrel Show. So it’s a bit like Seabiscuit, only with a human taking the horse’s place. Go, Radio, go!!
The film, set in the early ’70s, neglects to adequately convey the racist flavour of the era, and the team’s vile Radio-phobic quarterback lacks the truly menacing down-home-with-the-KKK vibe that surely would have been appropriate. To put it bluntly, Radio’s refusal to give segregationist racism its voice defeats the entire purpose of the enterprise.Radio may be vaguely admirable in intent, but it’s wishy-washy, lily-livered stuff, recommended only to chronic sentimentalists who can’t watch a dogfood commercial without crying.