Cubussoli Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Ensofter Overrated and overhyped

filippaberry84 I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Beulah Bram A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

mike48128 Most of the movie is incredibly slow moving, as we follow Ben and his brother from elementary school through high school, in "dreadful" Detroit. It feels compelled to show his terrible temper. Half way into the movie, after courting his wife, he is accepted to John Hopkins Hospital as a intern and specializes in head trauma and brain surgery. He pioneered the revival of hemispherical surgery in profound cases of epileptic seizures, where the malfunctioning half of the brain is removed. In 1987, the famous German Binder twins (renamed here as the "Rousch Twins") were separated. Both had separate brains though conjoined skulls. They never thrived and remained far from normal (one vegetative) and both ended up institutionalized. In the movie the operation is a full success. Is it entertaining? Cuba Gooding Jr. does a fair portrayal as Ben Carson in a very uneven film. Quite graphic at times. I did not enjoy it.

michelle_16480 This movie is about a young boy who lived with his mother and his older brother. The movie begins in 1987, where Dr. Ben Carson goes to Germany to visit a couple named Peter and Augusta Rausch, who have twins conjoined at the head. He knows that chances of saving them both will be a risk, because one baby always dies in situations like that. Ben agrees to do the operation, but he will wait four months so he can come up with a plan to save them both. While looking into some of his books, the movie flashes back to the year 1961, where 11 year old Ben Carson starts out life as an African American child from a one parents home with only a mother, with failing grades at school. Ben has an older brother named Curtis. Ben's mother starts making all the decisions for him, even though she can't even read because she dropped out of school herself, but she doesn't want the same for her boys. Their mother went to a mental institution to check herself out and she made them promise her that they would learn their multiplication table. When she sees her two sons' success hindered by TV, she schedules times that they are allowed to watch TV and when they aren't. , boys show great interest in watching only a quiz show later on and commands them to read two books per week from the library and give her a book report, she also moves them to better schools. This was a really great movie to watch because part of the movie focused on racism. Ben Carson went through being called names and not getting to get into college or getting a job because he was black. The kids and even the principle at school made fun of him because he was black, even though he was a very smart kid. This is definitely an inspirational movie, and I think many people should have the chance to watch it.

bandw This is the story of Dr. Ben Carson. A black man raised by a single mother in difficult circumstances, Carson went on to be a world renowned neurosurgeon and the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital. There are so many obstacles that Carson had to overcome, not the least of which was racial discrimination, that there is just too much to cover in one ninety minute movie. We rush through Carson's being labeled as the dumbest kid in the class, to his sudden rise as one of the smartest, then on to Yale, marriage, his internship, and his ultimate successes as a neurosurgeon. There is enough material in any one of those phases in his life for a full length feature. How Carson got from being the at the bottom of his class to brilliant would have been most interesting, but we are asked simply to accept that it happened because his mother limited his TV viewing and asked him to read books. We are given no detail on how Carson developed his appreciation of classical music at a young age. There is minimal background on his wife, except for a brief scene hinting that she is a musician. How Carson met his future wife and how that relationship evolved would have been interesting. His mother's depression is treated in a most cursory manner: she is not depressed, she is depressed, she has a brief stay in a psychiatric hospital, she is not depressed. We get almost no information about Carson's experiences in medical school. For most of this movie we could have gotten as much by simply having read a brief biography.Gooding is fine as Dr. Carson, as is Kimberly Elise as his mother. The kids who play Carson as a youth are not so good--they come across as reading from a script. The filming is less than inventive. In one scene Carson says he feels like a faucet that has run dry and the image of a slowly dripping faucet is shown.A lot of the scenes don't ring true and I was left wondering if anything even remotely close to them ever occurred in real life. The attempted stabbing seemed particularly hard to believe. When Carson was given a scholastic award in junior high, a teacher kept him on stage after the award while she berated the white kids in the class for not performing as well as a fatherless black kid, saying that they should be ashamed of themselves. I don't know, but that seemed over the top in a Michigan public school, even for the early 1960s. Carson's mother got a job as the maid for a professor who had thousands of books in his library and he winds up trying to teach her to read? Not likely. And so on.The swelling music frequently alerts us as to when we should be inspired.The message of "you can be anything you want to be" is a theme. But, not everyone can be a neurosurgeon. For example, Carson was endowed with a strong sense of three dimensional perception as well as having the required highly developed hand-eye coordination. And he has the stamina and mental disposition to handle the rigors of the job. In some ways these inspiring movies can backfire, since achievement at the level of a Dr. Carson is reserved for only a few and comparing oneself with someone like him can be discouraging.The final surgery scene, where Carson separates the Rausch twins who were born joined at the head, is exceedingly realistic. There is only a limited time that Carson has to perform this operation and the scene is played like one of those "you have an hour to save the world" dramas, complete with a clock counting down the minutes. And we know the operation will be successful, otherwise why would so much screen time be devoted to it?The story of Dr. Carson and his extraordinary achievements deserves a more complete and compelling telling than what is given in this movie. A similar story, that of Vivien Thomas, a black man who rose from being a janitor to being a surgeon (also at Johns Hopkins coincidentally), is told in the much more engrossing, "Something the Lord Made."

froglady99 I grew up hearing about some of Ben Carson's amazing surgeries and remember reading about him when I was a teenager, probably, so I was excited when I heard about this movie. I just watched it for the first time, and it's one of the best movies I've ever seen. I can't believe it was a made-for-TV movie! This movie tells the story of how Ben Carson went from being a kid who was a failure in school and had a very low self-esteem to a famous, gifted surgeon. It tells some about his family life and about two of his famous surgeries. This movie kept me glued to it all the way through--it was like a good book you can't put down!