The Longshots. Out Tuesday. (***3/10)
“If we got heart, we got everything we need.”
The Longshots was much, much better than I expected. You see, this movie is directed by Fred Durst. Former Limp Bizkit singer-rapper, backwards-red-hat-wearing, Break Stuff Fred Durst. If his career with Limp Bizkit was any indication, he became a singer-rapper-sucker before doing anything else with his life, which would lead me to believe that this was the area in which he showed the most talent. The whole singing-rapping-sucking thing. Which means that if he were to direct a movie, he would be a worse director than he is a musician, and his movie would likely be the worst one made since Glen or Glenda.
But I was pleasantly surprised. Fred Durst IS a much better film-maker than he is a musician. (I would, after all, give Limp Bizkit’s entire musical career a collective one-star rating, and the one star would come solely for the song “N 2 Gether Now”, which was produced by someone else and was basically a Method Man song that just happened to appear on a Limp Bizkit album.) So I expected this movie to be absolutely abysmal, and hands-down the worst movie of the year. But it isn’t. As it turns out, it just really, really sucks. Which drastically exceeded my expectations.
And with that, I award this weeks Cynical Cinema Schmaltzy Claptrap award to The Longshots, a movie which exemplifies Schmaltzy Claptrap perhaps better than any other. (It helps, too, that I didn’t review any Christmas movies this week.) Ice Cube has had a musical career that has been decidedly superior to that of Fred Durst. He has also had an acting career that has been vastly superior. (Cube has been in Boyz N Tha Hood, Three Kings. Durst starred in Population 436. Remember that one? Didn’t think so.) And Ice Cube has also been a producer of movies for a long time. How did he not laugh in the face of Fred Durst when approached to play the lead role in this film? How did he not read the script and bust a gut over the simplicity and lameness of it all?
It doesn’t matter, I suppose. This movie stars Ice Cube, and I’ll have to get used to it. This is, after all, a logical next step in the career of a guy whose last two big movies were Are We There Yet? and Are We Done Yet? I was really hoping we were actually done, but apparently not. There was still The Longshots that needed to be filmed. And respected people like Ice Cube, and talented actresses like Keke Palmer, were talked into appearing in it. Somehow. Possibly through threats and intimidation? No…that wouldn’t work on Ice Cube…I’ve got it! Revelation here people - Fred Durst must know the Jedi Mind Trick. You heard it here first. Look for him to be dating Scarlett Johanssen soon.
OK, listen to this and see if it makes you laugh. Because had this film project been proposed to me, I think I would have cracked up. The fact that it’s a “true story” is nice, but how often do true stories unfold exactly like every other movie Hollywood has ever made? Here goes: A young girl is getting picked on at school. The other girls call her a loser, presumably because she…reads books, I suppose. She’s pretty, she’s funny, she’s smart, but she’s still the school loser because…the other girls say so. Her uncle is a down-and-out unemployed man who is basically homeless - a real-life loser. When he begins taking care of her after school, they don’t much like each other. He doesn’t want to be bothered with kids, and she thinks he is a drunk and a deadbeat. They are both right.
Her teacher asks him to come into the class one day, as he’s standing outside in the hall. With a full beard, a woolen cap, and a paper cup full of booze, he embarasses Jasmine in front of the class, and almost gets into a fight with one of her classmates. But then - he learns that Jasmine can really throw a football. And he begins playing football with her after school. Within about a scene and a half, they all of a sudden love each other, they have bonded over football, she has become totally self-confident and he has cleaned himself up. They strike a deal - she will try out for the school football team if he will ask her teacher for a date.
Wait - the same teacher whose class he invaded, unshowered unshaved and smelling of liquor, threatening to fight the kids in the classroom? That one? Yep - apparently, he really impressed her, and she has a crush on him. Perhaps she is blind. And deaf. And has no sense of smell. Or maybe she likes ‘em really dirty. She’ll be awfully disappointed when she finds out that he’s cleaned himself up since two scenes ago. But of course they will like each other, and everything will work out. That’s the kind of movie this is.
Now, the coaches don’t want a girl on the team. Because they are coaches in a movie about a girl playing football. And the other players are angry about having a girl on their team. Because they are acting in a movie about a girl playing football, and that’s how players are supposed to be. Otherwise, there would be nothing for her to overcome, and no trust for her to gain! And I bet that within a scene and a half, that hurdle will be overcome as well! And of course it is. And the coaches love her and the players love her and she is leading the team toward the championship game, known as the Pop Warner Super Bowl.
Sidebar -
I recently reviewed The Game Plan, a dreadful movie starring The Rock from WWE, about a little girl who changes the life of her NFL quarterback dad.
http://blog.rogersradiointernet.com/cynicalcinema/2008/05/31/the-game-plan-should-have-come-up-with-a-betterplan-210/
And in that movie, they were not, apparently, allowed to say “Super Bowl”. Because there is a copyright on that or something. And yet in this movie, they say “Super Bowl” over and over. I suppose that the main reason there is because in The Game Plan, the NFL teams would be playing for the actual Super Bowl, and in this one it’s just the Pop Warner Super Bowl. Which must not fall under the same copyright laws. Or something. Just a thought I had.
So now, the uncle is cleaned up and sober (although we never see him getting sober. We just notice that all of a sudden there is no beer can in his hand at all times, because his neice can throw a football.) The neice is accepted by her team-mates and her coaches and her peers. Her mom is proud, and the town has both embraced her and developed football fever, and are rooting the team on to victory, Jasmine especially. So…what is left to do? How can there be a conflict before the Big Championship Super Bowl Game? Easy.
First, Ice Cube must explain his back story. One which we already, unless we were totally brainless, knew. He was a football star. Right there, on that same field, in that same place his niece is now a star. He had the world at his feet, his whole life ahead of him, and fat college scholarship offers and blah blah blah. So on and so forth. Then he injured himself. And his dream of pro football faded away, and he took a job at the Ol’ Mill or whatever, and left behind the glory, and then the Mill closed, and he was out of work, and blah blah blah. Such and such.
Now, he is explaining this to his sister-in-law. The one who came to him to ask him to look after her daughter. And you have to think, she asked her daughter’s homeless drunken uncle to look after her, and didn’t even know THIS much about the guy? Like where he used to work, or that he was a football star years ago? So one can only assume that ALL she knew about him was that he was a drunken homeless guy. And yet she set him up as her daughter’s babysitter anyway. Thank God she did this in a movie about girls playing football, or there would have been some serious questions about her parenting skills when her daughter perished in a cardboard-box fire.
And then - the big drama. The father, who abandoned Jasmine years ago, and for whom she has been pining the whole movie, shows up. He’s Ice Cube’s brother, so Cube knows he’s bad news. And that he’s only there because his daughter is a star on TV and in the news and such. And Cube knows that he will leave her again at a moment’s notice, because running away from his responsibilities is what he does. But of course, his daughter is thrilled to see him, and hangs out with him a bit before the Big Game, and they re-connect.
Then after the big game, the movie has to wrap up pretty fast. So although the father has done nothing bad since he returned, and nothing to indicate to his daughter that he is in fact bad news, and although she was thrilled to have him back in her life just a day ago, she now *bing* comes to her senses and rejects him. Why? Because the movie needs to end. And then he does some mean stuff afterward, showing his true colours, so we can feel good about the fact that she was so mean to him.
But we don’t. For all we know his intentions were pure, and he was really trying to do the right thing. So we don’t feel good about it. In point of fact, we don’t feel bad about it either, because we just don’t care any more. It’s time for the movie to wrap up, and wrap up it must, and not a moment too soon for me. I was getting pretty tired of this sickly sweet cookie cutter Schmaltzy Claptrap anyway. Oh, and Fred Durst - it’s cool with me if you still want to make movies. So long as you are not planning to make any more albums.