The story, which as we’re told is "based on a true story" (always words that chill me to the bone), is told from flashback, so we all know the outcome of the film. Or do we? We start in 1966 as former Navy Master-Chief Billy Sunday (DeNiro) is being escorted back to the brig after being caught AWOL. While waiting in the airport (or bus station or whatever), he catches a television news report of a crashed B-52 bomber that lost a nuclear warhead. On screen he sees a man he recognizes suiting up to dive into the ocean to retrieve the warhead…and we flash-back to 1943, when the familiar black man is a little boy. That makes sense doesn’t it?

So in the South of 1943 a large black man the elder Mr. Brashear (Carl Lumbley) is plowing a field. His young son stops to help him, and is told by his father to keep going to school so he can get out of the share-cropping business. We flash forward an unspecified number of years, and the young son is now a cut and muscular Cuba Gooding Jr., still plowing the fields. He never went to school, but now he’s joining the Navy in order to get out of the share-cropping business. As a goodbye gift his father gives him a home-made radio, with the initials A.S.N.F. carved into it.

Next scene, young Carl Brashear is on board the USS Hoist, as a cook. The U.S. Navy of the mid 1950’s wasn’t as integrated as we were lead to believe in High School. Brashear gets a hair up his ass and decides to join in the fun of swimming over-board, an activity that blacks were only allowed to do on certain days. This pisses off the rest of the white sailors, and one is sent after Brashear, who, of course, out-swims him. Back on board ship, the enlightened commanding officer (Powers Boothe in a small, but nice role), decides to promote Brashear, and give him an on-deck job as a swimmer.

Cut to several days later (I think, though it may have been the same day, I’m not sure, bad editing), during a cargo drop, a helicopter crashes into the radio tower of the ship, and hits the water. Immediately (though not that immediately) the divers on board jump into the water, and attempt to rescue the pilots. The first diver, the familiar Master-Chief Sunday brings his man up, but a little too late, he’s dead. Predictably there’s a problem with the second diver, and Chief Sunday disobeys orders to get the man to safety. The results being the second diver doesn’t die, but Sunday not only does irreparable damage to his lungs, damage that prevents him from ever diving again, but he is busted-down and removed from his ship to a training station. Brashear, watching all of this action from the deck of the ship is moved, and decides to become a diver. Yawn.

So three years later, Brashear finally makes it to the New Jersey dive school run by our old friend Sunday. Of course it’s still the racist 50’s, and no one wants the black man in their barracks. Only the stuttering Snowhill (Michael Rappaport) sticks with Brashear, if for no other reason than to have another sympathetic character so we don’t totally feel sorry for Brashear. So, time passes, and Brashear is predictably the best diver in the class, but his reading and writing skills are sorely lacking, so he goes into the city to get a tutor, a pretty young doctoral student named Jo (Aunjanue Ellis), who of course will end up falling in love with Brashear, simply because there’s not enough story here to have anything else happen.

Blah, blah, blah, Brashear has to endure taunting and the deck stacked against him, and the whole Officer and a Gentlemen thing is done again (in reverse though), and blah, blah, blah, racist officers who get what they deserve.

Big shock, Brashear graduates the dive school and becomes the only African American diver in the Navy. Sunday is busted down again, for disobeying orders and letting Brashear graduate.

Cut back to 1966!

Brashear, now a respected black man in the Navy, dives to the bottom of the ocean, to search for the nuclear warhead, and after the most exciting scene in the movie, involving a Russian Nuclear Sub, he does so. Once he gets on deck, he’s watching the warhead being craned on board, when, thwack, of course the cables break, and Brashear saves the lives of a couple of crewmen, but gets smacked in the leg, quite grossly I might say.

Next scene, Brashear is in the hospital, leg in a cast, and looking pretty gross. His only thought is to get back to diving and earn his Master-Chief status. Sunday meanwhile has bottomed out. His pretty wife (again, window-dressing only Charlize Theron) has committed him to a sanitarium (I guess, it isn’t really clear). He finally snaps out of his alcoholic fugue in order to send Brashear an article about pilots during World War II who had legs amputated, only to return to duty. That’s what Brashear wants to do too, but he has a paper-pushing asshole to deal with, who happens to be the same guy that busted down Sunday in the first place. So Sunday decides to clean up, and train Brashear to become a one-legged diver.

It’s at this point that I figured out that this movie was trying to be a true-life version of Rocky, only it should have been named Gimpy.

The finale is a predictably boring court-room scene, where Brashear must walk 12 steps in the new and improved only weighing 290 pounds version of a dive suit. Yeah! Post-script we find out that Brashear made Master-Chief, and Sunday and he moved in together to become gay lovers. Well that’s true, except for the last part.

UGH! This is the worst type of "true-story" movie, where the main character has to overcome SO MANY HAZZARDS to attain the unattainable goal. Rah rah, sis boom bah. I’m sure the real Carl Brashear really was a hero, he sure seemed to be in the film, but Audie Murphy he wasn’t. Yes, it was a great achievement, but as the film repeatedly tells us "I can’t imagine who’d want to become a Navy Diver." Undoubtedly, Mr. Brashear is a great man, who did overcome a great number of obstacles, but did we really need a movie about him? Surprisingly, I’d say yes, though I definitely feel it should have been executed more competently.

I blame both the screen-writer and director. The scribe, Scott Marshall Smith, is a first-timer, and it shows. I can’t tell you the number of times I winced at lines that DeNiro had to recite, and how many times I held my head at the dumbness of the story. The director, George Tillman Jr. should stick to smaller films, like his earlier Soul Food, because he clearly doesn’t have the scope to tackle what should have been an epic.

I’d be lying if I said that if I saw this in the theatre it would have been better. It was horrible, just downright horrible. Don’t bother.

My rating: * out of 5.