Hustle (2022)
Directed by Jeremiah Zagar
After discovering a once-in-a-lifetime player with a rocky past abroad, a down on his luck basketball scout takes it upon himself to bring the phenom to the States without his team's approval. Against the odds, they have one final shot to prove they have what it takes to make it in the NBA.
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It’s not in the same league as “Hoop Dreams” or “High Flying Bird” or even “Hoosiers” (1986) — what is it about basketball-movie titles and the letter “h”? — but it’s smart and agreeable and, emotionally, it gives a true bounce.
The underdog sports story is well-worn territory, especially in Hollywood, where these against-all-odds stories are eternal crowd-pleasers–from Hoosiers to Rudy to Rocky , we’ve seen it, and we’ve seen it done well.
“Obsession wins over talent” is one of the many courtside platitudes you’ll hear — like the genre Hall of Famer Hoosiers, this is a basketball movie that does double duty as a Coaching 101 handbook — and you never doubt that this film has a lot of obsession.
Whether it’s “Rocky,” “Hoosiers,” “Soul Surfer, “Crooked Arrows,” “Turbo,” “American Underdog,” “Heart of Champions,” or even the documentary “Manny,” there’s really only one way to tell these stories.
Even the familiarity of it all feels like a balm; to watch films like Creed or Hoosiers or Friday Night Lights hit their well-worn beats time and again — the humble beginnings, the training montage, the third-act showdown — is to know that there is still hope (at least on screen) for the Little Guy.
A tenacious scouting meeting between Stanley and Vince, in which they argue over the prowess of an international prospect who Stanley thinks lacks heart, is ripped from Moneyball .
In terms of sports movies, this one fits nicely as a cross between Jerry Maguire and Moneyball but one that marches to its own beat.
Underdog sports stories—think “Rocky” or “Creed” or “Jerry Maguire” or “Moneyball”— are hardly rare birds.
These narrative fallbacks coexist uneasily with the script’s occasional glances in the direction of inside-sports dramas like “Jerry Maguire,” “Moneyball” and especially “High Flying Bird,” which memorably turned a basketball draft story into a glassily cerebral anti-capitalist parable.
As are the other basketball-world stars making cameos; Trae Young, Tobias Harris, Doc Rivers, Kenny Smith, Julius Erving, and so forth don’t gum up the works à la Space Jam , but add a welcomed realism.
It doesn’t hurt that Hernangómez is easily able to evoke the unique dislocation of an athlete abroad, or that Sandler and James’ combined star power has paved the way for a Hall of Fame-worthy supporting cast of NBA legends past and present — Hernangómez’s former teammate Anthony Edwards brings smack-talking credibility to the role of Bo’s nemesis, even if the movie drops the ball on his arc — or that Philly native Zagar shoots the south side of the city with an even greater sense of hardscrabble romance than “Silver Linings Playbook” brought to Upper Darby and the city’s western suburbs.
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And if you don’t see the movie, go ahead and YouTube the white (as in “White Men Can’t Jump”) 5-foot, 8-inch, slam-dunking, supernormal-power-level deceptive dribbling Boucher, who often goes into maximum security prisons with a camera crew and confounds the hardcore, 24/7 basketball-playing lifer inmates (who adore him) with his wizardry.