Raw power is to be expected when you combine Academy Award winning actors Robert De Niro and Cuba Gooding Jr., but this film goes beyond the force.

“Men of Honor,” which opened last Friday, is a powerful film inspired by the life of Carl Brashear, a man with a relentless spirit and the first African-American to become a Navy Diver and then Master Chief.

Cuba Gooding Jr., wears the role of Brashear so well that he could pass as his son in real life.

Brashear’s character draws you in from the beginning, the son of a sharecropper who battles almost overwhelming obstacles in the newly integrated Navy in the late 40s, and 50s.

“I’m more proud of this film than any I’ve ever made,” says Gooding.

Robert De Niro adds great dimension to what is already on the page as the character Billy Sunday, the senior officer who eventually joined forces with Brashear to help him buck Navy bureaucracy.

De Niro shares Gooding’s enthusiasm about Brashear and his fellow Navy Divers. “The description ‘salvage mate’ doesn’t do these divers justice,” De Niro notes. “This is a very specialized skill.

Even today these divers risk their lives working at sites of downed aircraft, salvaging what they can.”

Brashear became one of only seven enlisted men in history to be enshrined in naval archives, with a 164-page volume transcribing an oral history of his life and career.

Screenplay writer, Scott Marshall Smith did an outstanding job on his first screenplay produced.

The film, directed by George Tillman, Jr. and produced by Robert Teitel, is definitely one of the best films out this year.