Let me just go ahead and spoil this for you: With no time left on the clock, and access to the playoffs at stake, the blind guy runs it in for the game-winning touchdown. It's true — at least the part about Travis Freeman once having been a regular small-town Kentucky kid who loved football, suddenly went blind, didn't stop playing football, and became an inspiration. Trueness is relative in 23 Blast's version of the Travis Freeman story, where triumph-of-the-spirit clichés are everywhere but nary a curse word is uttered, even in the locker room. This is the directorial debut of the actor Dylan Baker, a rich regular-guy presence in many movies and shows, who serves up an uncritical fantasy of the spiritual uplift to be had, with God's help, from a violent sport known to cause brain damage. Playing Freeman's supportive father, Baker plants himself about as far away as you can get, Americana-wise, from his breakthrough role as the tragic pedophile in Todd Solondz's Happiness. His wife Becky Ann Baker brings a spark of life as a tough-love therapist, and in the role of Travis, soap-star hot guy Mark Hapka shrewdly reconfigures his dim beefcake gaze as a simulation of sightlessness. It's hard to begrudge so sincere an appreciation of courage in the face of adversity, but easy to note that the movie can't seem to resist so much literal imagery of lights going out.
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