White Men Can’t Jump – Review
101 Minutes, Rated R
Written by Kenya Barris, Doug Hall, and Ron Shelton
Directed by Calmatic
**NOTE: this post will be updated with audio once we actually have the chance to talk about it. Until then, you can read Mark’s review below. Remember, though, you can listen to all our discussions of this and every other movie directly over on ACAST. Stay tuned.**
Synopsis:
A remake of the 1992 film about a pair of basketball hustlers who team up to earn extra cash.
Who, exactly, was clamoring for this remake of the Woody Harrelson/Wesley Snipes not-quite-buddy comedy from 1992?
That’s right: nobody.
Nobody was asking for this in any way, shape or form.
Starring Sinqua Walls (Friday Night Lights, 15:17 to Paris), Jack Harlow (in his first acting role), Teyana Taylor (A Thousand and One), and Laura Harrier (Spiderman: Homecoming), we get the story not of two hoops hustlers, but two guys who once had big -– and real! — dreams of going pro, who for different reasons had that taken away from them.
Here’s my problem with this movie: despite the fact that its character premises are actually pretty well thought-out, the basketball scenes play well enough in support of the believable enough motivations, and the performances (especially Taylor and an almost criminally under-utilized Harrier), which really should have been enough for this movie to have some fun with…
It’s not fun.
White Men Can’t Jump can’t even play with the title properly, turning it into a throwaway remark overshadowed by cheering crowds (“People act like white men can’t jump”), which confirms that this movie exists solely to exploit the recognizability of the IP.
Shit, they should have called it Hoop Dreams (I know, I know… already taken) and it would have played better.
But the biggest issue I have with this one is that Kamal (Walls), a promising High School player who threw everything away in an instant his senior year ten years ago when his anger got the best of him, is a truly solid guy; he loves his wife and son, and is absolutely, 100% busting his ass trying to move past people’s memories of him and what happened when he was young has to deal with Jeremy (Harlow)…
Jeremy was a highly touted college player (Gonzaga) before injuries derailed his shot at the big-time. Now he spends his time training (and documenting for social media) players and trying to rehab his knees in an ever-more-desperate attempt to get another shot.
And he hustles players to pay for court time, as well as hawking a “30-day cleanse” nutrition program. He’s Vegan (it’s called out, because he can’t even eat at a Vegan restaurant because: “half of these vegetables are hybrids.”
I shit you not.
What? That doesn’t sound bad? Well, if not, we also get to listen to Jeremy continually spout endless liberal guilt talking points to (or more accurately at) Kamal and any other black person around.
So what should be, and perhaps could have been, an interesting look at two men whose lives haven’t gone the way they thought they ought to have and how they move on from that, but instead takes the overriding idea of family (on both sides), and especially the importance of the black family, and manages to make it to the end of the film and still stick us with the white savior trope.
And, as mentioned above, Jeremy is a pretty fucking annoying white savior.
This movie was surprisingly better than I had anticipated going in, but trips all over itself in so many ways trying to do… I don’t know exactly what… that by then I’m not nearly as happy with the outcome as I might have been.
White Men Can’t Jump hits Hulu exclusively (https://www.hulu.com/movie/white-men-cant-jump) on May 19 and stars Sinqua Walls, Jack Harlow, Teyana Taylor, Laura Harrier, and Lance Reddick
And remember, if the BEST thing you can say about a movie is that it’s “visually stunning,” then they’ve done something wrong.
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