White Men Can't Jump (Hulu): A Review - A Flagrant and Fragrant Foul of a Basketball Movie
/****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 1.25 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This rotten remake has no redeeming value or reason to exist.
Back in the old, dilapidated, smoke and championship banner filled Boston Garden, the dynastic Boston Celtics of Bill Russell, John Havlicek, Dave Cowens and Larry Bird had the greatest of home court advantages because the famed parquet floor on which they played had numerous dead spots. These dead spots would greatly reduce or eliminate the bounce of the ball thus making dribbling a much less automatic action. The Celtics took great advantage of this court abnormality by funneling unsuspecting opponents to dribble into the dead spots and thus either turn the ball over or slow their attack.
The Celtics made the unwise decision to move out of the charming, rat-infested old Boston Garden in 1995 and left their dead spot parquet advantage, and their mystical, magical, luck of the Irish mojo, behind. Their new home, the corporate, cold mausoleum known as TD Garden, has no such advantageous anomalies, and in turn has only produced just one Celtic championship banner in its near thirty-year existence…a stark contrast to the 16 championship banners the team won during their 48 years playing at the old Garden.
Which brings us to the new White Men Can’t Jump movie which premiered on Friday on the streaming service Hulu. The film, a remake of the 1992 Ron Shelton basketball comedy, reminded me of the old Boston Garden not because it is worthy of championship banners, but because it is so riddled with dead spots it has no bounce to it at all.
The film, which follows the trials and tribulations of two basketball has-beens, Kamal and Jeremy, desperate for one last touch of hoops glory, is written by Kenya Barris, directed by something called Calmatic, and stars Sinqua Walls and rapper Jack Harlow. The end result of this third-rate group of moviemaking wannabes is a vacant, vapid and hollow shadow of the 1992 version which starred Wesley Snipes, Woody Harrelson and Rosie Perez.
To be clear I am not one of those people who is repulsed by this new film because I adored the original. The truth is I hated the original White Men Can’t Jump. The main reason for that was that Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes were embarrassingly bad at basketball. They couldn’t even remotely fake being able to play…and as someone who did play and who was a huge fan of the sport, I found that a hurdle much too great to overcome.
The good news is that this new version features marginally better, but still not great, basketball, but that doesn’t overcome the astounding lack of chemistry and the charisma deficiency of the two lead actors, Sinqua Walls and Jack Harlow.
Snipes and Harrelson lacked basketball ability, but what they didn’t lack was chemistry and charisma. Walls and Harlow on the other hand can somewhat simulate playing the game but have all the spark of two bodies lying next to each other in refrigerated drawers at the morgue.
Harlow, who if you don’t know is a famous rapper – and yes, I still find the notion of white rappers to be just as cringey as you do, need not worry about quitting his day job and heading to Hollywood to be the next white Will Smith, as God knows the black one is already white enough.
Walls at least played basketball in college at the University of San Francisco – where Bill Russell won two NCAA championships before leading the Celtics to 11 NBA titles…but unfortunately for Walls and for us, he is no Bill Russell on the basketball court or Wesley Snipes in front of the camera. He is a rather dull, one-dimensional actor devoid of any compelling inner life and his basketball ability is not what I would describe as aesthetically pleasing.
To be fair to Walls and Harlow, the script they have to work with is a scattershot piece of garbage. Walls’ character Kamal has a dark past and an odd relationship with his father, but none of these things are adequately fleshed out and are thus rendered annoying and unsatisfying to the viewer.
Harlow’s character Jeremy struggles with serious drug addiction but that battle never takes shape or is given any narrative energy and ends up just being ignored instead of dramatically exploited.
The two men’s personal lives, which feature the love interests Imani (Kamal’s wife - played by Teyana Taylor) and Tatiana (Jeremy’s girlfriend played by Laura Harrier), also fall decidedly flat.
Kamal and Imani’s marriage has all the familiarity of two people passing each other in a bus station. Jeremy and Tatiana’s relationship could be dramatically promising due to it being inter-racial and Jeremy’s drug addiction, but none of those topics are ever explored.
The director of this dud is Calmatic, a commercial director whose only other major film credit is the 2023 remake of the 1990 movie House Party. If you were unaware that the new House Party was released this past January then that makes two of us. Calmatic has no idea how to tell a story or how to elicit coherent and compelling performances from his cast and thus has no business directing films.
The bottom line is that the new White Men Can’t Jump is an instantly forgettable, meaningless, lifeless, purposeless exercise in nothingness. I’d say the film is a brick or an airball but the reality is that this movie soiled itself in the locker room and never even made it out to the court to take a shot.
If you really want to laugh while watching some basketball drama featuring bad acting, skip White Men Can’t Jump and tune in to the NBA playoffs starring the King of the Receding Hairline LeBron James as he shamelessly flops all over the court.
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