When Will Smith’s turn as Dr. Bennet Omalu, the pathologist who discovered CTE, first started making the rounds, the consensus was “Oh, this does not look good for the NFL.” In the time since CTE became talked about in the mainstream, the NFL has – again and again – denied reports, withheld information, and lost lawsuits. The main thing the NFL had going for it was that people still really loved football, and they didn’t really think about the other stuff so much. Concussion makes that hard to do.

Of local interest, former Eagle Andre Waters (Richard T. Jones) plays a semi-prominent role as a man unraveling from CTE before his suicide. While most of the film is flooded with Steelers logos, t-shirts, and imagery, a lingering shot of Waters’ funeral features Eagles balloons. Additionally, Stewart Bradley’s infamous stumble makes a concussion montage, and former punter Lee Johnson is shown getting absolutely crushed from a clip of ESPN’s “Jacked Up,” which looks especially dated, brutal, and barbaric.

Smith’s turn as Omalu – once you stop seeing Will Smith with an accent and start seeing Dr. Bennet Omalu – is revelatory. Where some other actors may have taken Omalu and made him a man seething with righteous anger, Smith balances his real sense of persecution with quiet humility and search for the American dream. In fact, one of the film’s few flaws is that it’s incredibly heavy-handed on the whole “all I want is to be an American” thing. When Albert Brooks – the film’s lone, but great comic relief – says Omalu is going to be an “American hero,” it took some work to hold in a groan.

Though not the film’s official tagline, Concussion is basically being marketed as “the film the NFL doesn’t want you to see.” For a majority of the movie, however, the NFL isn’t the bad guy, football is. Football is what is hurting these people. Football is dangerous. Football turned Mike Webster’s brain to mush. But once we step into the NFL’s offices, once Paul Tagliabue steps aside for Roger Goodell, and once the NFL starts selling their “concussions don’t cause long-term problems” rhetoric, the cross-hairs go right on the league.

But the villain is empty. Due to defamation concerns, Luke Wilson’s Goodell and Paul Reiser’s Dr. Elliot Pellman are relegated to glorified cameos, and Goodell looks more buffoon than active conspirator. The NFL still looks bad, really bad, but they could have looked (even without worry of defamation) much worse. The NFL lives in the shadows.


Will the film change minds? I don’t know. At my screening, there were gasps and groans at every slow-motion, concussion-fueling hit from the NFL’s past. A line in the film about if “ten percent of mothers decided that football wasn’t for their kids” it would cause a chain reaction that would shudder the NFL felt like a call-to-arms, but an unenthusiastic one. Instead of the film inspiring viewers to say “football is bad and the NFL is evil,” the message seems to be “football needs to be safer, let’s do more research.” It might not seem as damning as you thought it’d be, but it’s more in line with Omalu’s message itself.