Will Smith, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Albert Brooks, Alec Baldwin, Luke Wilson, Stephen Moyer, David Morse
Peter Landesman
“Concussion” is a film without an audience. Football fans won’t see this movie, because they don’t want to embrace the fact that the NFL lied to them for years about the dangers associated with playing football, and threw thousands of its former players under the bus in order to protect the brand, because money. Who does that leave, then? Medical procedural fans? Well, maybe, because “Concussion” plays more like a TV movie than a theatrical release. The worst thing about it is that the subject of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) deserves a larger audience than it currently has, and yet the movie’s villain, unlike the like-minded “The Insider,” which targeted the tobacco industry, is the NFL. People like the NFL, which means they’re far less likely to see a movie that tells them that their favorite thing is wicked.
It is 2005, and Nigeria-born Dr. Bennet Olamu (Will Smith) works for the coroner’s office at Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County Hospital. He has an odd relationship with his patients, in that he speaks to them while he’s determining their cause of death. One day, he examines the body of local Steelers legend Mike Webster (David Morse), who’s recently committed suicide, and sees an unusual amount of protein in his brain. Unluckily for him, as it were, Bennet examines a few more football players who exhibited erratic behavior shortly before their premature deaths, and concludes that they are suffering from brain trauma that arose as a result of repeated blows to the head. Bennet thinks that he is doing the NFL a favor by giving them this information. He is mistaken.
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