A Review by Phil Calabro
2005, Paramount Pictures/MTV Films, Dir. Thomas Carter - Starring Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Ri'chard, Ashanti, Lacey Beeman, Rob Brown, Dana Davis, Denise Dowse, Channing Tatum, Sidney Faison, Rick Gonzalez, Roger Lim, Jason Sweet, Debbi Morgan, Adrienne Bailon, Terrell Byrd
I have a favor to ask of the MPAA. Their job is to screen films, give it a rating, and give the greenlight for public release. My request is a simple one - to screen films for similarities to any other movies, and if it follows the same trend as any others from the genre, it is completely disqualified. Ok, I lied. It's not simple at all - but it would save me and plenty of others time from watching movies like 'Coach Carter'. Sports movies in general are completely formulaic, even this year's perfectly fine 'Friday Night Lights' followed the same setup as 'Hoosiers' and other classics. But then there's this, just a set of sequential basketball cliches, irrelevant problems such as gang shootings and cocaine addictions, and an ending where the losers are still the winners. Oops, did I spoil the movie? Oh well, there are only two ways it could've ended anyway. 'Coach Carter' is a shallow, dense piece that's all brawn, no brains. It creates useless dilemmas that are never solved, and employs Samuel Jackson as a gimmick rather than a character.
In California, the Richmond basketball team has dropped to an all-time low. They've wasted their skills on the 'street life', which is so typically displayed as a set of old warehouses with barbed wires and a heavy-set man with a thick mustache and leather jacket. Ken Carter (Jackson), who runs a sporting goods store down the road and was also a record-setter at Richmond High, becomes the new coach for this group of misfits. These misfits are nothing more than average ebonics-rambling ballers that're all stereotype and no soul, if this gives you any clue where this movie is going. The team is set straight into line, but some of the players quit because of Carter's aggressive methods. Ken sets the rule - no lower than a 2.3 GPA, or else you're off the team. He gets the team to play much better, but when they're not working as hard as they should be in the classroom, he locks down the gym...and forces them to work to pass. Meanwhile, he also has to help a coke addict get over the death of his dealer/best friend, one of the basketball players' girlfriend is considering an abortion, and the California School Board wants to fire Ken. Ah, MTV films! How you cease to amaze me!
Samuel L. Jackson was given a potentially good role, but the script has a skewed portrayal of our 'beloved leader'. When we first meet him, he comes across as an overly sarcastic jerk - but the trailer makes it look like he's going to be our hero anyway, so no worries. Jackson makes Carter look like half crank, half philosopher. First he could be making the team do an exorbitant amount of sit-ups, then he could be questioning each of the players' morality. It's an uneven bind, no transgression whatsoever for the character. Robert Ri'chard, who is second billing and is known (or not) for his role on 'Cousin Skeeter', is a such a pointless character that it simply baffles my common logic. He plays the son of Coach Carter, who goes to an upper-class private school and would rather play basketball for Richmond. He serves no purpose other than a space-filler for the team, a little less than he didn't on the puppet show. Rob Brown and Ashanti play a young unmarried teenage couple who are expecting a child soon. Rob Brown plays Kenyon, who's role on the team is ignored for the fact that the topic of abortion may be discussed. It treats abortion as a hot topic, a serious one at that, but when the end of the movie draws near, the script just writes it off, without any discussion of consequences at all. My complaint is not in the politics of abortion itself - it's the fact that it was passed off as dry story matter.
If you like sports montages, have we got one for you! 'Coach Carter' features the play-on-play of about four games. Each takes about ten to fifteen minutes to feature, but there's a similarity between all of them. You guessed it - they're all the same! We've got the Richmond Oilers down a few points, but then Coach gives them a few words of advice, and Bam, Presto, they win. If anyone needed a reason that this movie drags on for too long, they've already got an answer. It's a demeaning movie to children, but I should hope that parents bar the kids from this venue in the first place. With topics and language flailing around the place like wildfire, it's not exactly a friendly film. 'Carter' has plenty of questions to face, but ends up answering only one. We have one example here that cracked me up beyond belief. The coach berates one player constantly, Timo Cruz. He keeps asking him what his deepest fear is in a very repetitive fashion. Now, Timo's not exactly the brightest star in the sky, so we don't expect a lengthy answer. But at the end of the film, he gives this quaint philosophical answer, as if he had it memorized the entire time. Unrealistic, much?
'Coach Carter' is an empty, unfulfilling mix of failed sentiment and bad sports cliches. It takes on so many real-life problems, but answers none of them. Poor Samuel L. Jackson stands around waiting for the end of the movie, where he can give the uplifting speech that makes them all officially 'gentlemen'. In between, he's just another hard-working coach.
