We all love a good old “based on a true story” film. You know, the kind where you step into a cinema and tell yourself you’re watching real events that real people went through?

Somehow, there’s always that feeling that you, too, could be the hero or heroine in the story, overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles to achieve your dreams.

But then again, even though some Hollywood tale starts or ends with the “based on a true story” line, they are just that – tales. Of course, there is always a certain amount of truth to every story, it’s just how much they add on to the events that may, or may not, make you a little more skeptical about the actual “true” events.

The Pursuit of Happyness
Chris Gardner is a working class zero. His wife leaves him and their child, he goes bankrupt and ends up on the streets dragging his small son along with him from welfare home to welfare home, even spending a night in a train station restroom.

Having some mad skills with the Rubik’s Cube does him well, though, as he impresses an employee at a big company called Dean Witter and lands an internship as a stock broker which eventually leads to his eventual “happyness”.

Cue the “awww” moment and the inevitable tears from the audience. It’s a great story, and most of it is true, like the Dean Witter training programme bit.

Will and Jaden Smith in The Pursuit Of Happyness.

Sadly, his acceptance into the company had nothing to do with solving a puzzle. Though Will Smith does a great job depicting admirable fatherly values, in real life Gardner didn’t even know where his son was the first four months of the programme. In fact, Chris Junior was actually living with his mother at that point in time.

In the film Gardner gets arrested just before his big interview for overdue parking tickets. The true events are that he was actually arrested on charges of domestic violence by his second wife.

He did turn his life around after landing the job as a broker, but there were things he did in real life that was whitewashed away, like selling drugs and doing cocaine.

The Hurricane
In this film, Denzel Washington plays Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a talented boxer who inspired a Bob Dylan song. Carter is a promising athlete falsely accused and convicted of a triple homicide.

Three persons took up his cause (Carter has been in prison for 20 years) using a key piece of evidence that eventually proves his innocence.

There’s a scene in which Hurricane beats a Caucasian boxer so badly, yet the racist judges award the fight to the Caucasian man.

In actual fact, however, it was Hurricane who won the fight, leading to the real boxer Giardello suing the filmmakers and getting a nice settlement.

More disturbing, however, are other elements of Carter’s life left out of the film. The real boxer was arrested for assault and armed robbery when he was only 14, and by the time he turned 22, he had been imprisoned twice for “brutal street muggings” and booted from the military after being court-martialed four times. When it came to the murders, there was enough evidence to convict him, TWICE. After all that, the “key evidence” that proved his innocence didn’t actually exist.

Denzel Washington in The Hurricane.

What happened was that the prosecution failed to turn over some evidence, thus not giving Carter a fair trial, and instead of re-trying the case for a third time, the judges decided that it wasn’t worth it.

Besides, Carter had already been in prison for 22 years.

21
Maths genius Ben Campbell catches the eye of Maths professor Micky Rosa, who enrols him into the MIT Blackjack Team.

Ben’s main reason for taking up the offer was so that he could collect enough money to go to medical school.

When the team became good enough, they were brought to Las Vegas to try their hand at a real card game. The film is inspired by the true story of the MIT Blackjack Team as told in Bringing Down The House, the best-selling book by Ben Mezrich.

Jim Sturgess as Ben Campbell in 21.

In reality, controversy surrounded the film because the real MIT Blackjack Team consisted almost totally of Asians.

To give the film some credit, the producers did cast a pair of Asians to be in the team, but only as sidekicks. While the Caucasian kids did all the intellectual stuff, the Asians goofed around for comic relief in the film.