Billing itself as the movie the NFL does not want you to see, ‘Concussion’ delivers as a game-changing wakeup call but the blow is softened with its made-for-Hollywood love story. The real question: How will fans respond?
Concussion is a football movie that goes against the grain of its genre. Midway through the film, Dr. Bennet Omalu (Will Smith) explains the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy to researchers at Carnegie Mellon by showing a picture of a woodpecker, whose brain remains unscathed despite ramming its head against a tree some 12,000 times a day.