This biopic won't be breaking any records

IT'S been 80 years since Jesse Owens single-handedly destroyed the myth of Aryan supremacy at the Berlin Olympics by winning four gold medals. Beyond those athletic achievements his legacy is somewhat more complicated but Race sidesteps those issues, painting Owens only in broad strokes, winning races and breaking records at will. It doesn't go beyond standard biopic boundaries and, as a result, what could have been a soaring sports epic feels strangely uninspired.

Owens learned to block out distractions from the crowd during competition; similarly, the film focuses only on the three years leading up to the Games, ignoring his humble roots as a sharecropper's son and also his post-Olympic fortunes, when he struggled to make a living. The Owens family had final script approval, which explains the movie's limited coverage and lack of character development.

Appropriately enough, Race doesn't gloss over the problems Owens encountered in his own country because of his skin colour. In 1930s Cleveland, racial segregation was a fact of daily life: Owens and his black team-mates had to endure racial taunting, sit at the back of the bus and stay at blacks-only hotels.