This movie has broken me. I am so confused, and I don’t know how to react. I didn’t like the movie, nor did I dislike the movie. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad. It is the perfect example, the poster child, of a movie so clichéd, a movie so easily forgotten, when you mention it to director Michael

Tollin he will probably reply, “I directed that?”   

  Tollin is famous for producing and co-creating“All that” The 90’s Nickelodeon skit show, along with producing a whole bunch of sports movies.   Radio is 2003’s “Heartfelt sports story about a man with the odds stacked against him who prevails and makes everyone like him” story. It takes place in 70’s South Carolina in a high school football-obsessed town.  Coach Jones (Ed Harris) is pressured to bring a state championship for T.L Hanna High School, when he finds James Robert “Radio” Kennedy (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and pretty much adopts him into the football team, being a helper assistant guy. At first, everyone hates him, led by cliché “Mean handsome bully guy” Johnny (Riley Smith) and he’s traumatized, including being tricked to walk into a girl’s bathroom, and being locked in a shed after being tied up. 
 

Radio attends every T.L Hanna football game as Coach Jones’s “Special guest” on the sidelines, jumping up like a cheerleader. But when he accidently calls out the play to the other team, the team turns on him. Coach Jones stays with him, and ends up spending more time with him then with wife and kid. Principal Daniels (Alfre Woodard) questions whether not to send him to a homeless shelter, while Coach Jones argues that he should stay. The team slips, and ends up having a losing record, and word spreads through the tightknit town that it’s somehow Radio’s fault.
  

The movie is full of cliché jokes, and there is a whole part of the movie with little to no good scenes, and it was very hard to get through that part. The writing in it is good, but not great. Tollin’s directing is nothing special, as I mentioned before, but what really stands out is Cuba Gooding Jr’s acting. To me, he was unfairly robbed of an Oscar, especially considering how The Academy loves these kind of cheesy stories.
The way he talks, to the way he holds his pencil, to the way he contorts his face, and it’s all perfect. I give Gooding Jr’s acting 5 out of 5 stars. 
 

The movie has some good other than that though. Some scenes are tight, and funny, but those are too scarce to consider this movie good. I give it Five out of Ten stars, almost solely on Gooding Jr’s acting.