Every intention of the creative team behind The Great Debaters is an admirable one. Watching it, you never feel like you're witnessing a project for money or celebrity. Director and star Denzel Washington is trying to make an old-fashioned drama about the powerful period before the civil rights movement really got underway. There's a great story to tell there about how it took a number of brave souls to stand up and speak to inspire others to act. The actions of the civil rights movement were the end result of the courage of a number of unheralded people willing to stand up and point out what was so wrong about our country. A few of those brave souls went to Wiley College in Texas and led by Melvin B. Tolson (Washington), they formed one of the most successful college debate teams of the era, even challenging Havard in the national championship. For subject matter, The Great Debaters is critic-proof, but the execution is open to discussion and it's there where Washington and his screenwriter Robert Eisele let the audience down. The Great Debaters features an excellent story, but it's just further proof that it's not always the facts but how you present your case that wins or loses the debate.

Washington plays Tolson, who, in 1935 Texas, formed a debate team with four of his most passionate students, three of whom would go on to face Harvard. Henry Lowe (the instantly charismatic newcomer Nate Parker) was the troublemaker, the drinker and womanizer who responded with his instinct more often than with his head. Samantha Brooke (Jurnee Smollett) was the lone woman on the team, a shy girl who often had trouble getting her debates started, but was as smart as anyone on the squad. James Farmer, Jr. (Denzel Whitaker), was the youngest member of the team, the son of the theology professor, Dr. James Farmer, Sr. (Forest Whitaker). A shy young man, James feared his father and had feelings for Samantha, but was afraid to act until he was forced to. Some of the characters in The Great Debaters are reportedly composites of their real-life counterparts, a fact that only makes the audience want to know more about the actual team instead of the fictionalized one.

And that's the key problem with The Great Debaters. You never feel like Melvin, Henry, Samantha, or James are real people. They feel like elements of an inspirational and rather predictable story and it does a disservice to what people like them accomplished in the '30s to turn their tales into fodder for what ends up nothing more than a TV movie-of-the-week. These young men and women and the teacher who led them did something incredible, but you never feel the urgency or the fear in The Great Debaters because it's clear from frame one that it's the kind of story that's going to have a happy, uplifting ending. When you know a happy ending is coming all along, a filmmaker needs to work harder to surprise you and Washington never does. The Great Debaters plays it way too safe, when life for the real people who inspired it was anything but.