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Directed by Thomas CarterCast
Samuel L. Jackson (Coach Ken Carter)
Rob Brown (Kenyon Stone)
Robert Ri’chard (Damien Carter)
Rick Gonzalez (Timo Cruz)
Nana Gbewonyo (Junior Battle)
Antwon Tanner (Worm)
Channing Tatum (Jason Lyle)
Ashanti (Kyra)
Denise Dowse (Principal Garrison)
Octavia Spencer (Mrs. Battle)
Last year, two true-life inspirational sports movies featuring tough-as-nails coaches received huge amounts of promotion: Disney’s Miracle, the saga of the U.S. Hockey team’s upset of the Soviets in the 1980 Olympics, and Universal’s Friday Night Lights, a small-town high school football story. Friday Night Lights in particular assaulted audiences before it even opened with accolades from critics splashed across its trailers proclaiming it one of the greatest sports films ever made. Neither film lived up to the tub-thumping hype. Miracle had a great performance from Kurt Russell, but otherwise was a stilted bore, and Friday Night Lights was a crassly slick and emotionally sterile experience, like Hoosiers drained of every bit of its small town charm and pumped up into a beer commercial.
So it happened that in January of this year, Paramount’s Coach Carter slipped into theaters with essentially the same story, but done right. It also earned quite a bit more dough than its predecessors. Which it deserved; Coach Carter is a darned good example of a genre that for that last twenty years has desperately tried to recreate the magic formula of David Anspaugh’s Hoosiers. Coach Carter ain’t Hoosiers, but it does enough right to make amends for a lot of the awful sports-slop we’ve have to sit through recently. Yes, it’s based on a true story, but the movie doesn’t drive the point into your skull every chance it gets. And Samuel L. Jackson…well, he’s just as awesome as you would expect.
Welcome to Richmond California. Small city, high crime, low hopes. Less than six percent of the senior class at Richmond High will go to college. Ken Carter, a sporting goods store owner and Richmond alum, arrives to take over coaching the sorry boys basketball team, the Oilers. But Carter has greater ambitions for his team than merely winning the state championship: he wants them to turn into true student-athletes, so he makes them sign contracts with him that promises they will maintain a C+ average and good class attendance.
The resistance toward this policy doesn’t come just from the players, but their parents, the principle, and the school board as well. The central conflict of the film comes when Carter, realizing that many of his players have blatantly failed the contract, locks down the gym and starts forfeiting games in the middle of Richmond High’s undefeated winning streak. The furor around this event sends a sobering message: people would rather let students underachieve so they can grab a tiny bit of glory as basketball players (“Basketball is all these kids have got!” one parent screams) instead of forcing them to reach for college and a better life. Carter stands up for what he believes: academics before sports, and if we let the students slide here, it sends an awful message.
It might sound as if basketball plays a secondary part in Coach Carter, and it actually does. For a film of this type, relatively little time is spent on the court in actual games. The first half of the movie, before Carter moves in with his lock-out, contains the most basketball action, including a very tense down-to-the-wire confrontation. The “big game” ending, however, isn’t the film’s highlight. The movie survives off what happens around it, and that’s rare for a sports movie.
In general, the movie does a good job at delineating the personalities of the players through their relationship with the coach, but in two places the script feels the need to wander off from Carter and explore the players’ lives outside. Here Coach Carter commits its only serious personal foul. The extremely dull subplot between player Kenyon (Rob Brown) and his girlfriend Kyra (Ashanti) pushes the running time past the two-hour zone. Their scenes together slam the film to a halt each time they start. The story of player Timo Cruz (Rick Gonzalez) and his edging into the dangerous criminal world also distracts from the main story, but at least it makes the audience aware of the deadly life that Carter wants his players to avoid. The only excuse for the Kenyon-Kyra scenes is to play up the name value of Ashanti, but they end up doing the film a disservice.
When the spotlight shines on Jackson’s sincere and gutsy performance, the movie moves briskly. Fortunately, the spotlight shines on him a lot. Some of his scenes, such as his ridiculing of his players’ trash-talking celebration every time they score a basket (“Look at me! I tied that shoe! Give me some love for the shoe!”) are hilarious. Jackson miraculously manages to make the script’s obligatory weepy speeches sound genuine. He turns Oscar clip sound-bites and inspirational drivel into words that you could imagine coming from the mouth of a real person. For all the successes of Coach Carter—the intelligent script, energetic supporting cast, and attentive direction—Samuel L. Jackson meshes it all together and keeps the viewer watching to the end, even with Ashanti trying to disrupt him.