Hurricane Katrina comes. New Orleans is devastated: a thousand dead; tens of thousands of homes destroyed; 28,000 never returned. Forest Whitaker is the basketball coach at a high school in one of the worst hit areas. He puts together a team.
It's one of those high-school sports movies based on reality, and the first question I asked was "how much is real?" In truth, there's nothing real about a movie: the characters fall into categories. There will be conflicts. There will be the moment of despair during the big game. There will be a great locker room speech, and final victory. It's all very inspiring, and all very set. No one makes movies about underdogs who lose.
Yet when Forest Whitaker takes the sort of role made into a plaster mold by Pat O'Brien in KNUTE ROCKNE ALL AMERICAN, he brings to it an ability and energy that makes it real. You can see him thinking. You can see the anger and sympathy and honesty in his impassive face. You can see the dignity with which he walks through the sidelines to his place on the bench: always in character, always in the moment.
It's a great piece of acting in what should have been a cookie-cutter movie, and which went straight to video. Bonnie Hunt gets two lines and three scenes. Taraji P. Henson gets the thankless job of his wife. Courtney B. Vance, Isaiah Washington, all take small roles, and Tim Story directs cameraman Larry Blanford to shoot images of devastation and triumphant shots from the hoop's viewpoint. It's a canned, cardboard, conventional, derivative, imitative, ready-made, tried-and-true, unimaginative, uninspired, unoriginal sort of movie that is startlingly good.
