WHITE MEN CAN'T JUMP (2023) - Mark Reviews Movies

White Men Can't Jump, 20th Century Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 18, 2023

If there's a reason these filmmakers felt creatively driven to remake writer/director Ron Shelton's 1992 film, the new version of White Men Can't Jump never reveals it. This movie, written by Kenya Barris and Doug Hall, loses much of what made the original film tick, but beyond that, it turns the premise and characters into broadly generic entities.

Shelton's film was more about the allure and consequences of the hustle than basketball. While basketball does remain a secondary concern in this updated iteration, the primary one here isn't nearly as insightful or compelling.

Barris, Hall, and director Calmatic essentially turn this premise into the tale of two men pursuing a dream against all perceivable odds. That's about as familiar and dull as it sounds, especially when those characters only seem to exist with that end goal in mind.

One is Kamal (Sinqua Walls), who was a promising high school ball player about a decade ago, only for an incident at a game to destroy his prospects (Flashbacks offer that back story piece by piece over the course of the narrative, which keeps his major flaw and personal challenge a bit too much of a mystery—although not much of one—to become invested in Kamal's attempts to overcome it). Now, he spends his days working as a delivery driver and his off-time either hanging out on his former school's basketball court or with his wife Imani (Teyana Taylor) and young son.

There's probably something to this character, in the dichotomy of how he clings to his glory days in some safety and is ashamed whenever anyone recognizes him outside of that environment. It doesn't matter, though, because Kamal quickly meets and is schooled by Jeremy (Jack Harlow), a former college basketballer whose career was cut short by, not one, but two torn ACLs.

He's still clinging to some hope of getting himself in good health or the illusion of it by way of a nutrition regimen, painkillers, and stem-cell treatments that are well out of his financial situation at the moment. Jeremy has no delusions of making it to the big-time professional league. He'd be fine making a living playing in the minors—a delusion that frustrates his choreographer girlfriend Tatiana (Laura Harrier), who's treated with even less consideration than Kamal's wife, whose character flips in her outlook just when the screenplay needs her to.

Both of them want money, with Kamal hoping to earn enough for his wife to start a salon and Jeremy looking to pay for that medical treatment, and unlike the setup of the '92 film (which involved needing to get out of a bad living situation and murderous gangsters), there simply isn't much dramatic momentum to such wishy-washy motivations. It certainly doesn't help that Barris and Hall never quite convince us that the pair's turn to hustling unsuspecting players on various street courts across Los Angeles is an actual plan, let alone a way of staying afloat.

To be fair to the movie, Walls and Harlow do have a natural rapport, even if the sulking Kamal is often overshadowed in the bickering and bantering by the fast-talking Jeremy. The characterizations pretty much end there, and there definitely isn't any reason to be invested in the characters' goals and methods when they seem to change every other scene or so.

The hustling, apparently, doesn't last long, because most of their marks see right through the gimmick of Jeremy's supposed white nerd being a complete amateur. That's part of the modern-day twist on the material, but as a joke, it shatters the apparent premise entirely. The script overcompensates, then, in basketball sequences set up as gags, with opponents who are clearly just meant to be the targets of Jeremy's insults and one loser pulling out a flamethrower in his frustration.

Without a convincing hook for either the plot or these characters' motivations, the movie quickly falls back on the easy jokes, some attempts at emotional manipulation with Kamal's father (played by the late Lance Reddick), and that old sports-movie chestnut of the Big Game, although it's Big Tournament here. For a movie that keeps the sport in the backdrop, it's quite unfortunate how rushed the climactic tournament is, as Calmatic substitutes any sense of flow to the games with lots of slow-motion highlights.

The problem isn't necessarily that White Men Can't Jump has changed too much of what made the original film work. It's that the new version never commits to a solid notion of what to do with those changes.

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