Concussion is a movie that’s more important than it is good. The reason is when you attack the National Football League, you’re attacking the United States. We don’t care if you call us bullies, bores or thugs. We don’t care about our citizens dying because the NRA has no sense of balance. We don’t care if our education and health standards have gone completely down the toilet. We do care, however, about how you manipulate a Cover 2 with a read option. And we care about it a lot. Concussion cuts straight to the big problem with our national obsession with football.
Pittsburgh is a great place to talk about football for a few reasons: 1) the Steelers are always good 2) the city doesn’t have a whole lot else going for it 3) Just like the NFL, the city is replete with blue collar folks employed by 1%ers. And so Concussion begins here with the death of NFL Hall of Fame Center Mike Webster (David Morse), fewer than twenty years removed from his playing career. Living out of his truck, Mike lost his family, wealth and sanity. How did this happen to a man most would agree had everything going for him?
Will Smith plays Nigerian degree collector Dr. Bennet Omalu, MBA, PhD., Esq., QHS, PSP, CF, S.J., Inc. Dr. Omalu is a forensic pathologist at the Allegheny County coroner’s office and on call when Mike Webster is brought to his table. The eccentric Dr. Omalu likes to talk with the dead, politely pleading to tell him their stories. I don’t mind him talking to the dead, so long as the dead don’t talk back. Mike’s story turns out difficult to pin down, so Dr. Omalu takes him home (so-to-speak), on his own dime no less, for a little extra-curricular pathology. The problem is while Mike Webster’s brain clears CT scan criteria, there was obviously something wrong with it, making his behavior erractic and suicidal. The answer? Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). Clearly, Dr. Omalu’s research skills far outweigh his taxonomic skills.
Personally speaking, this is my version of American football: on the word “go,” the biggest, ugliest, fastest, meanest, angriest man in the world attacks you like you evicted his mother, not stopping until either you are hurt or the whistle blows. And when that ends, you both get up and he does it again for three more hours. An outsider to American football, Dr. Omalu actually sits down with tape, just like a head coach, and watches trauma after trauma after trauma go down. It’s pretty obvious to anyone who has seen football played that the game is potentially lethal. You don’t wear all the padding to do “The Macarena.” So, thus having identified a disease and a cause, what does Dr. Omalu do? Why, warn the NFL of course! They have to know. And how do you suppse the NFL takes this helpful behavior? What’s the saying? “No good deed goes unpunished.” Dr. Omalu is the personification of that particular adage.
There’s strong acting here from a number of sources: David Morse, Albert Brooks as Dr. Omalu’s boss, Gugu Mbatha-Raw as the doctor’s new live-in refugee love 
interest, but Will Smith tops them all with his recreation of the Nigerian scholar and whistle blower. This role likely won’t win any awards, but it might garner a nomination or two.
The NFL deserves bad press. A lot of it. The product is manipulative and short-sighted. Is there a reason the “bye” week was invented other than money? How about Monday Night Football? Thursday Night Football? Sunday Night Football? That’s just the greedy part, not the part where the league has intentionally hidden evidence that football is a far more dangerous game than most of us considered. The NFL knows it has our dollars and our attention, which makes it that much more reprehensible when it lies to the public, especially about safety. This isn’t a politician; they’re paid to lie. And this isn’t Tommy Flanagan, somebody nobody pays attention to. This is a product millions and millions of Americans consume without question. That makes the shame of the NFL hiding information much more on the order of Big Brother than not. And at the end of the day, it’s important to note that none of us really want football to change, just to be safer – but if you can’t have the one without the other, you have to choose safety; the alternative is suicide. Literally.
♪Well I’m a linebacker, Bay Packer
Show me a ball and Pavlovian attack ‘er
Got one brain. It’s in pain.
Smash a halmet. Repeat refrain.
I’m like a hammer, did I stammer?
See that RB coming this way? Kablammer!
I’ll hit your face
Don’t care ‘bout grace
I’m the walking vision of the rock and the hard place
Bang your head! NFL will show you fear
Bang your head! Enjoy your seven-game career♫
Rated PG-13, 123 Minutes
D: Peter Landesman
W: Peter Landesman
Genre: FOOTBALL!! WOO!! Sorry, that’s “Safety in Football” Awwww.
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Retired NFL Players
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Soon to be ex-Commissioner Roger Goodell (ideally speaking)
♪ Parody inspired by “Metal Health”
