Alley oops!

While Uncle Drew isn’t a failure, basketball movie misses the mark

Playing the game the right way. For anyone who has ever watched televised sports, the notion is a familiar one. Commentators love to drone on about its importance without ever really stopping to define it. Throughout Uncle Drew, starring Boston Celtics guard Kyrie Irving as the title character, our protagonist often waxes poetically about playing the game the right way.

But his insistence on being unselfish and playing the team game bleeds a bit too much into the script of a movie that, let’s be honest, features a character who was initially created for a series of Pepsi commercials. The full-court press moralizing of the story makes what should be a simple comedy seem unfocused and more importantly, un-fun.

It all begins when Dax (Lil Rel Howery) finds himself in need of a squad to compete in an upcoming street ball tournament at Rucker Park in Harlem. His longtime rival Mookie (Nick Kroll) steals street ball star Casper (Aaron Gordon) away from him — along with his girlfriend Jess (Tiffany Haddish).

Dax’s first recruit turns out to be Uncle Drew, a legendary blacktop player who once played an entire game left-handed while eating a ham sandwich in his right hand. Drew agrees to help Jax, but on one condition: He gets to bring the band back together. The remainder of the film is a tourde-force in basketball celebrity cameos, as Dax and Drew travel around the country tracking down his former street ball mates,

which include Big Fella (Shaquille O’neal), Preacher (Chris Webber), Lights (Reggie Miller) and Boots (Nate Robinson).

The introductions of these characters allow each of the former real-life basketball stars to show off their acting chops, and they’re not all that bad. But whenever Uncle Drew tries to go deeper and add a dimension to the plot, such as teasing the rising tension between Uncle Drew and Big Fella, it falls flat.

It’s an issue the filmmakers probably should have known coming into this project. When you take a character created for an athlete-sponsored soft drink commercial and decide to turn it into a feature film, all you really need to do is reward the audience with a few treats. Of which, there are a few, full of real-life basketball references such as O’neal alluding to former teammate Kobe Bryant, or Webber making a joke about a timeout gaffe in college.

Uncle Drew as a storytelling vehicle doesn’t quite work, but like any fun summertime sports film, it will allow you to turn your mind off for an hour and a half, enjoy some air conditioning and watch a familiar narrative unfold: The stars reunite. They face a nemesis. There’s a final showdown that helps bring all the storylines together.