User Reviews

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."

As I write this, the prior most recent posting about this movie is from December 2014, well before Ben Carson made his announcement to run for the Presidency. To my mind, there's no finer human being on the planet than Carson, a soft spoken individual who strikes a chord with people when he speaks, especially with the common sense approach he takes to issues that plague current society. It will be interesting to see how far he goes in his quest and what tangible impact he makes on the political scene.

Reading some of the other reviews here, there are those who doubt that the Ben Carson story presented here is actually true. One needs to pick up the book upon which the movie is based, and read the Ben Carson story first hand. His is a remarkable journey proving that if someone like him, growing up in impoverished circumstances with little hope of a future, can actually rise above those surroundings to accomplish whatever he's determined to do. Much of the credit is due to a remarkable mother who believed in him and brother Curtis, setting them on a life long path of reading, learning and accomplishing things that others would think impossible.

The events in the movie are all documented in "Gifted Hands" the book, and if anything, the book is more compelling than the film because one gets a sense of Carson's innate humanity in dealing with the circumstances and situations which forged his life. One reviewer on this board dismisses the knife incident as if contrived for the film, but this event was a seminal moment in Carson's life that made him realize that a singular instance of thoughtlessness could doom one's life forever. Through the power of prayer and applying his own determined initiative, Ben Carson has become a role model that parents of any race can direct their own children to emulate.

Story of Ben Carson head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins. The film stars Cuba Gooding Jr., in his best performance in a long time, as Carson . It's a performance that doesn't make you question his Oscar win for Jerry McGuire all those years ago. The story is structured around Carson 's attempt to separate Siamese Twins who are joined at the head. Carson is hesitant to do so since anytime a similar operation had been tried one or both of the children had died. As the doctor tries to find out a way of saving both children the story flashes back to events in his life to show us how he got to where he is today. Its an uplifting story and if the film occasionally plays like a movie of the week you really don't mind since the performances are so strong that everything is smoothed over. I really liked this movie a great deal and was completely blindsided by it, I really didn't think I was going to like it. Worth a look.

When you look over the roles that Cuba Gooding Jr. has had over the years, seeing the diversity in the characters, you realize what a gifted actor he is. He shows it clearly in this role, as Ben Carson, gifted surgeon from very humble beginnings.

The movie opens with a difficult case where Dr Carson is contemplating the separation of German conjoined twins, sharing a cranium and parts of their brains. His big hurdle is figuring out a way to keep them from bleeding to death during the surgery. From that we are treated to a long flashback of his life from a young student, through his teen years, and medical school.

Ben Carson was not a "natural." He had developed spotty study habits and was distracted by hours of TV after school. As a result he was borderline failing in all his classes. But the awakening came when his mother insisted that he and his brother spend less time watching TV and more time reading books from the library.

Ben Carson became a success from his mother's motivation, and from his own motivation to became a doctor. As the movie draws to its conclusion we are again taken to the beginning, the difficult case of the conjoined twins. He pioneered a procedure which proved to be successful.

A bonus in the DVD extras include the real Ben Carson, who today is not that much older than the actor who plays him in this movie.

The movie is very predictable. Everything goes wrong, then all of a sudden he is a straight A student. The movie always follows this cycle. It is funny that there are almost no cases of racism in the entire movie. You can almost predict what will happen next. All the problems Re solved way too easily. Kid gets new glasses, and gets good grades. He ditches the lectures and get an A on the conveniently important exam he had to pass. It doesn't even make sense to put this dramatic part of the movie - we all know he ia going to pass. And what the heck was this university student Ben? He looks like a 40 year old!! I honestly wish the movie was more centred on the two important surgeries than on those boring and predictable childhood stories.

The photography is not memorable. There are beautiful locations, but no interesting camera work or good compositions. Even TV shows like House have done much better. Music is good... If you ignore the soap-opera dramatic background sounds used on intense scenes. They should have stick with the proper classical music.

Overall it is an interesting story, but told on a movie that has many flaws that make it very predictable and boring. I can't imagine this being played on a movie theatre.

It is interesting how Ben Carson was raised and how he was educated. But as a biography the film is not that balanced. Although his anger issue was touched on it was quickly glossed over. Similarly - it was a phenomenal achievement to separate the Binder twins - surgically. However, the film and the end narrative imply that the twins survived to live a normal life. The truth is far from that.