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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 41.27%
Worth A Look: 20.63%
Average: 14.29%
Pretty Bad: 22.22%
Total Crap: 1.59%
4 reviews, 39 user ratings
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| Coach Carter |
by Peter Sobczynski
"Like every other inspiring teacher/coach movie, only less so"
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Hey kids, are you struggling with both your studies and your perimeter shot? Thankfully, the good folks at Viacom are willing to fork over the solution to your problems for the mere price of a movie ticket. It turns out the secret to achieving academic and athletic excellence against all odds is surprisingly simple–all it requires is to have Samuel L. Jackson yelling at you for a few minutes, immediately followed by an inspirational montage. Granted, you would think that there would be a bit more to it than that, but that is about all that you will learn in “Coach Carter,” a disappointingly shrill and condescending movie that lacks the very courage and conviction of character that it was theoretically designed to celebrate in the first place.In a performance veering dangerously close to self-parody, Jackson plays Ken Carter, a no-nonsense guy who returns to his old crime-ridden high school to coach the failing basketball team, pledging to restore them both athletically and academically. He kicks out the troublemakers, makes the remaining players perform zillions of wind sprints and informs them that if their grades drop, they will not be allowed to play. The players succeed on the court but when most of them fail to bring their grades up, Carter does the unthinkable and benches the entire team until they improve in the classroom. Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t make him the most popular man in town and everyone–parents, teachers and members of the school board–want to get rid of Carter in order to salvage the season, but it is at this point that the kids decide to straighten up, fly right and pave the way for an ending that contain at least 20 more minutes of basketball–such scenes being far easier and attractive to cut into a compelling trailer than footage of people sitting around studying.
The problem with the film is that the filmmakers clearly have as little interest in academics as their characters; while there are plenty of intricately-depicted sports-related scenes, the drama is so flat-footed that we are treated to scenes where parents, teachers and even the school principal flat-out tell Carter that his hope to raise their grades (even before the lockdown) is wrong and that they don’t want to be bothered simply so that Carter has something to overcome besides the apathy of his players. And since they are assuming that their target audience won’t sit for a film about schoolwork, they throw in such unnecessary diversions as gang shootouts, a wild teen party that looks like a PG-13 version of “Caligula” and a teen pregnancy subplot that appears to have been wedged in for no other reason than to provide a role for singer Ashanti that will ensure that this MTV Films production will get much promotion on “TRL.” When the drama about the grades finally rears its head, it comes so late into the proceedings that the element that should have theoretically been the focus of the film becomes just another distraction.There are literally dozens of films about there involving teachers inspiring their students to get better grades in order to improve themselves (“Stand and Deliver” is probably still the model of the form) and just as many in which tough-but-fair coaches pull their ragtag teams of misfits together for a victory that will reflect not just on them but their entire community–two excellent recent examples would be “Miracle” and “Friday Night Lights.” No matter which example you choose, I can pretty much guarantee that it is more authentic and sincere than the shallow likes of “Coach Carter.”
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=11449&reviewer=389
originally posted: 01/14/05 23:40:38
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2005 Palm Springs Film Festival. For more in the 2005 Palm Springs Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
14-Jan-2005 (PG-13)
DVD: 21-Jun-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
26-May-2005
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