This is a real missed opportunity. From the opening credits, it’s clear that John Singleton is not the man to make this film. I have never been a fan – though I had yet to see his magnum opus when I wrote this review – and the opening credits, which feel like they belong to a melodrama, are the first clue that Singleton doesn’t quite now how to handle this great subject. We live in a strange world where cheating in sports is seen as worse than extorting pensioners, or other white collar crime. Marian Jones took performance enhancing drugs. To hear her tell it, she may have not been 100% aware that’s what they were when she took them. (Remember, it was the very early 2000s.) But Singleton doesn’t do a very good job of making her case. He inserts himself into the film and more seems to want to tell the story of how Marian Jones impacted her fans. Jones got an absolutely absurd penalty: she went to jail for 6 months for lying to the government and spent 48 days – 48 days!!!!!!!! – in solitary confinement and there is no doubt in my mind she got the sentence because she’s black and she’s famous. Yes, she should have been more honest in her initial with the interview, and yes, she shouldn’t have taken them in the first place. But both of those moral imperatives ignore the social circumstances that surrounded her use of performance enhancing drugs and her denial of such use. Namely: the pressure to win, the willingness to do anything her coaches said, the fact that all people lie, and that many even lie to authorities, and of course her blackness in the United States, in a country which continues to treat black people horribly. Singleton does a pretty piss poor job of dealing with all of this ambiguity. Instead he tells us she’s a new mom and her husband tells us that she’s dedicating her life to church and family like a good little girl. A missed opportunity, like I said.