RACE THE SUN is based on a true story about a group of Hawaiian high school students who competed in the 1990 World Solar Car Challenge - a race for solar powered cars from the northern coast of Australia to the southern. The story opens with the arrival of a new teacher, Ms. Beecher (played by Halle Berry). She's an English teacher assigned to teach a science class composed of mainly of "lolos" - local, working-class kids. She sends some students who haven't submitted term projects to the district science fair to get ideas. One of the students, Daniel, who has a frustrated passion for mechanical design, admires the solar-powered racecar exhibited by some prep-school "haoles" (whites). The car is to compete in a race from which the winner will advance to the world championships in Australia.

When Daniel touches the car in admiration, a confrontation ensues. The lolos are ejected from the fair and land in detention. The lolo tough-guy, Eduardo, decides to get even by kicking some heads. Daniel says, "Do it with this." He hands him a design for a solar-powered car.

I was happy to see the kids were not portrayed as outright hooligans, but rather as working-class spawn from whom no-one expects very much. They contend against financial and technical limitations, internal conflicts, but, most of all, authority figures who don't think they will (or don't want them to) succeed.

This movie is simply the latest in a long tradition of kid-underdog movies. Such movies tend to do best with audiences of ages less than or equal to those of the characters on screen. The bunch of high school girls in the rows in front of me seemed to really like it.

As for me, I thought the acting was pathetic. The roles of Daniel and his step-sister were handled well enough. But Jim Belushi, as the apathetic shop teacher, was sort just there (granted, that was his character). Halle Berry didn't provide much beyond her perkiness and good looks. And some of the girls playing the students were REALLY bad. The plot wasn't hard to predict and, near the end, the celebration scenes got on my nerves.

Nevertheless, RACE THE SUN was not even half as bad as I thought it would be. It made me laugh and smile far more than it made me cringe. It steered clear of slapstick humour which would have undercut its believability. It gave a glimpse of Hawaiian ethnic dynamics. And in a strange way, the miserable performances from the kids kind of made their characters more real, almost as if the kids from the real 1990 race might be playing themselves.

RACE THE SUN is cute and entertaining. But I wouldn't race to the theater for it.

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