Grade: C

Verdict: All wet.

Details: Starring Robert De Niro and Cuba Gooding Jr. Directed by George Tillman Jr. Rated R for language. Two hours, 8 minutes.

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Review: Here's a weird kind of achievement: “Men of Honor” is a real-life story that contains barely one single lifelike moment. With every dramatic scene and turn of phrase molded by a formulaic, Screenwriting 101 mentality, it's pure Hollywood pap.

This would-be uplifting drama, starring Cuba Gooding Jr. and Robert De Niro, is “inspired by the life of Carl Brashear,” according to the press kit. That's like saying a 100-watt bulb is “inspired by the sun.”

Gooding plays Brashear, the first African-American to become a Navy diver. In the press notes for the movie, screenwriter Scott Marshall Smith writes, “This isn't a connect-the-dots biography. I follow Carl's life and career, but my goal was to be true to his spirit, not his shirt size. Everyone wanted the script to resonate as much as possible, so as a dramatist, I sometimes took it up a level.”

Put another way, this is the next best thing to fiction, a biographic framework tricked out with invented scenes and characters. That includes De Niro's role as Billy Sunday, the Master Chief Navy Diver and instructor at the dive school. He's a hard-driving, stubborn, alcoholic racist.

And he never existed, or, in the words of the press notes, he's “a composite of various Navy men.” Oh. OK.

Brashear's story, likewise, plays like a composite of various overly familiar follow-that-dream movies. He has to pull himself up from poverty as a sharecropper's son in Kentucky, and prove himself strong and smart in the Navy in order to get out of the galley and have a chance to earn his rank as a diver.

“Men of Honor” contains nonstop racist cursing and ostracism of Brashear, meant to remind us what obstacles he had to overcome. About the mildest example is when he arrives at the school and Sunday sneers, “Now all we need is an organ grinder.” (De Niro is basically recycling his psycho performance from “Cape Fear.”)

No doubt there were plenty of racist servicemen in the late '50s and '60s. But in the movie, virtually every character but Brashear is defined by his virulent hatred, including the loony commander of the school, Pappy (Hal Holbrook), who seems to have wandered in from a military satire like “Catch-22.” As Brashear braces himself against insult after insult, the script gongs home the same (and only) point. All right, already, we get it!

Gooding is straitjacketed by a script so determined to show Brashear as a plaster saint, he never comes across as a living, breathing man. Only once, when Brashear chooses his career over his family, does the movie suggest something prickly and maybe not so nice about the man. The movie doesn't follow through on this hint, though. Gooding's infectious energy and edge get swallowed by a simplistic nobility that comes across as more dull than heroic.

Nobody onscreen seems to be having any fun, except Charlize Theron, who turns up in another invented role, playing Sunday's frisky young wife. Tipsy, with her lipstick smeared at a New Year's party, she's the only actor who (at least temporarily) brings a hint of spontaneity in the movie's relentless march toward its “inspirational” courtroom climax.

With its shrewd mix of political correctness, patriotism and racial content, “Men of Honor” is the sort of prestige film that virtually defies you to criticize it. I can already imagine the angry e-mails and letters heading my way. It may be like the response I got for my negative review of “The Patriot” from readers who mistakenly thought I was criticizing the actual American Revolution, rather than the manipulative fictions of the moviemakers. There's a big difference.

George Tillman Jr. (“Soul Food”) directs with polish and care, and he puts together a couple of moderately exciting action scenes. The men of “Men of Honor” spend a lot of time underwater. But it's the artificial vacuum of the film's script that will have audiences gasping for air at the end.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service