This true story is about the Navy's first African-American master diver.

Robert DeNiro plays Billy Sunday, his redneck instructor, which makes for plenty of racial tension throughout.

The film captures the real danger of undersea diving with plenty of military drama. It gets a little melodramatic at times, but I bought it.

This week, a movie about racism in the Navy, and sailors who, ah, well, swear like sailors.

Actually, this film has a lot in common with Pay it Forward, in that both have great actors, fine acting, and good stories, and both are ruined by over-manipulative direction and dialog.--a movie trying too hard to tug at your heartstrings.

"Based on a true story"? I guess so.

Men of Honor is a serious, determined, and respectful salute to the son of a Kentucky sharecropper who joined the U.S. Navy in 1948, the year that President Truman desegregated the military. He helped to break the Navy's color line.

The movie is instructive and upstanding.

It's overacted at times and somewhat over-dramatized. But it's honorable.

The star is an actor of concentrated emotion, and he gives the film what spirit it possesses in this true story.