Friday May 1,1998
Movie Reviews
11A
Spike's shot at basketball rims out
By Jeremy M. Doherty
jdoherty@kansan.com
Kansan movie critic
Academy Award winner Denzel Washington (left) stars as temporarily paroled prisoner Jake Shuttlesworth whose future depends on his being able to convince his estranged son Jesus (Ray Allen, right) to accept a basketball scholarship at the governor's alma mater. Contributed Photo
People never have singled out Spike Lee for restraint behind the camera, and they aren't about to start with the basketball drama He Got Game.
With all the subtlety of a marching band, Lee leads the lonely fight against sports agents and manicured college recruiters, complaining loudly that they have perverted the great game of basketball.
This is news? Where was Lee when Tom Cruise discovered that for us in Jerry Maguire?
To make sure folks with superlow IQs don't miss that "starting" revelation, Lee opens his movie in Smallsville, USA, filming corn-fed kids enjoying some low-pressure rounds of hoops. Filmed in syrupy Norman Rockwell colors and punctuated with an overtly sentimental music score, He Got Game reveals that its director has turned a corner:
Spike Lee, radical filmmaker, has morphed into Spike Lee, unabashed sentimentalist.
At times, He Got Game shows signs of greatness. The game sequences assault the senses with the grit of street play, and the director culls a solid performance from his star, Denzel Washington.
He Got Game
The problem is with the writing. He Got Game has only one strong element — the relationship between a convict (Washington) and his estranged son (real-life NBA player Ray Allen).
Kansan Rating: ** out of *******
Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes
Rated R for profanity, sexual
situations and mild violence
But Lee struggles to make this part of the story work. Jake Shuttlesworth (Washington) is serving time for murdering his wife during a drunken dispute years earlier. While Jake has been in prison, his son, Jesus (Allen), has matured into the No. 1 high school basketball player in the country and is now fielding offers from a slew of universities.
The governor wants Jesus to sign up at his alma mater. If he does, the governor will commute Jake's sentence.
It sounds simple enough, but Lee decides to keep father and son apart through much of He Got Game's 135 minutes, focusing instead on the less-interesting world of back-slapping sports recruiting. The scenes between Washington and Allen contain the only real drama, but it's distressing unoriginal.
For his part, Washington relishes his role with and acts with more intensity than he's shown
in recent parts. But Lee ham-strings his star, keeping his motivations out of reach until the audience has stopped caring.
Allen's deficiencies as an actor are as sensational as his knack
for three-point shots.
Lee is a fine director when he has the right material. When the material is mediocre, as it is here, he shifts into overdrive with herky-jerky camera work
and editing. He Got Game winds up looking like an exceedingly long Nike commercial — an intriguing thought, given Lee's long relationship with the shoe company.
Major flaws keep sequel from success
Scott Bakula stars in Major League: Back to the Minors. Contributed photo
Third installment desperately needs showroom Sheen
By Jeremy M. Doherty
jdoherty@kansan.com
Kanson movie critic
Go figure. Major League: Back to the Minors actually suffers from the absence of Charlie Sheen.
Rick "Wild Thing" Vaughn may not be one of the great creations of modern cinema, but Sheen suited the material in the first two Major League movies like a well-worn mitt0. For once, he dropped his pretty-boy routine, absorbed the energy from Vaughn's infamous punk hairdo, and played the material as though he really believed it.
Fans of the original 1989 comedy may welcome the return of Corbin Bernsen and Dennis Haysbert, but don't bet on it. Bernsen's Roger Dorn is still an unlikable manipulator, while Haysbert's Cerrano, the voodoopracticing outfielder, continues to suffer from an underwritten premise. They're only picking up their paychecks here.
Without Sheen, who's apparently doing just fine playing second fiddle to Chris Tucker these days, the Major League series is exposed in this latest installment for what it is: a clumsy assortment of go-team-go cliches and simple-minded sitcom rubbish.
The story is that Dorn, having retired from the ball field, now owns the Minnesota Twins and a struggling Triple-A team, the South Carolina Buzz.
Major League:
Back to the Minors
Running time: 1 hours, 35 minutes
Rated PG-13 for mild profanity
The Buzz needs a new manager, so Dorn recruits washed-up pitcher Gus Cantrell (Scott Bakula) for the job.
Major League: Back to the Minors isn't exactly a bad movie. Director-writer John Warren actually seems to think the corny teamwork sermons he gives Cantrell. Bakula himself delivers each line as though he were playing Henry V.
Big laughs, all of them.
But the movie plays it too lazily. We know that the hotheaded young batter (Walt Goggins) will eventually come around to Cantrell's easygoing manner. That Cantrell will find his calling as a manager after slumming in the minors for years. That the ragtag team will pull it all together before the big exhibition game against the Twins.
But the movie needs a little sizzle. It needs to have Charlie Sheen stroll onto the field, wearing his Buddy Holly glasses while the crowd belts out the lyrics to Wild Thing.
With the real baseball season finally underway, sports fans may as well stay home and see some real action for free.
Audience held prisoner by twists of new Mamet movie
By Jeremy M. Doherty jadoherty@kansan.com Kansen movie critic
David Mamet won the Pulitzer Prize for his play Glengarry Glen Ross and penned well-received scripts for Wag the Dog and The Verdict. Most agree he's one of the best writers working today, but he rarely receives enough credit for his flair as a director.
If there's any justice, that perception should change with The Spanish Prisoner, a sprawling, headache-inducing thriller that dares the audience to solve its riddles while it merrily yanks the rug out from underneath. Like Mamet's little-seen gem House of Games, Prisoner takes us into a world of paranoid power games and blurs the line between deception and reality.
Our hero, or what goes for a hero in Mametland, is Joe Ross (Campbell Scott), a young genius who's just completed a groundbreaking invention called "The Process," which will net his company untold millions.
For Ross, the triumph is somewhat more personal. He came from a working class neighborhood, and the impending fortune spells out a new social horizon for him—if he can only get his boss Klein (Ben Gazzara) to get the deal down on paper.
While in the Caribbean to iron out the deal, Ross strikes up a friendship with Jimmy Dell (Steve Martin), a freewheeling playboy who takes a sudden interest in "The Process" and warns Rose to be wary of his boss' actions.
Quickly, Ross begins to experience trouble. The FBI is asking some very uncomfortable questions about his friendship with Dell.
Gradually, as friends abandon him and the threat of violence looms closer, Ross realizes someone is after "The Process" and won't take no for an answer.
One of the remarkable achievements of Mamet's screenplay is that he makes no effort to describe "The Process" in any great detail. Most writers would only be too happy to give minute after minute of state-of-the-art explanations, but Mamet is too smart for that. He knows that the less we know about "The Process," the more intriguing it becomes in our imaginations.
Mamet's trademark dialogue, with its shotgun pacing and cadences, is here like an old friend but shorn of his legendary profanity.
The performers acquit themselves admirably, slipping right into Mamet's distinctive rhythms. Surprisingly, Martin offers *Prisoner*'s most striking performance, creating an aloof, chilling character who is miles away from his cheery *Father of the Bride* persona.
Unlike House of Games, Mamet's complex structure here comes at the expense of sympathetic characters. The crisscrossing plot points inevitably strike the viewer as cold, even mean-spirited. The movie gives the brain a workout like nobody's business, but it just might shatter any previously held notions about the basic decency of humanity.
The Spanish Prisoner
Kansan Rating: **** out of *****
Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes
Rated PG for thematic elements including tension, some violent images and brief language
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