Review of Coach Carter (2005) by Terri H — 23 Apr 2009

Like Hoosiers about 20 years before it, Coach Carter is a well-done feel-good film mixing athletics with high school drama -- well, about as feel-good as any film with a fair amount of profanity and gang violence can be.

It's another scenario where the underdogs are whipped into shape with tough love by an idealistic coach. Of course, it's about half a century after the time at which Hoosiers took place, and Coach Carter is in many respects a different ball game.

The arena isn't whitebread rural Indiana, but the tough, ethnically mixed, disadvantaged urban neighborhoods of the San Francisco Bay Area community of Richmond. Much of the message, however, remains the same.

Ken Carter (played with admirable fortitude by Samuel L. Jackson) is just as concerned with molding his boys into men with a firm disciplinary hand as he is with teaching them basketball, banking on making them winners on the court as well as in real life.

The four-month turnaround in his charges' maturity, academic performance, and (lest we forget) the win-loss record that follows is for the most part predictable. But it's an acceptably entertaining ride nonetheless, and if your kids' attention might flag during the love scenes between one of the players and R&B star Ashanti, the well-constructed, reasonably realistic sequences on the basketball court will rev them right up again.

A fair amount of gritty detail -- including teenage pregnancy, dilapidated housing, parents and school officials more concerned with winning basketball games than making sure the players graduate, and gang warfare -- also elevate this above the usual athletic triumph film.

And while the goals might be achieved a little more smoothly than they customarily are in real life, the message -- of putting as much effort into responsible character and education as athletics -- is one that most viewers will enthusiastically endorse.