Sandler stars as NBA scout who finds his 6-9 underdog
In the pecking order of professional sports, is being a scout considered an undesirable gig? I have no idea. But the Netflix movie “Hustle,” starring Adam Sandler, takes it as a given that the job blows.
Look, maybe it does. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to move up the ladder, as Sandler’s Stanley Sugerman so clearly does. A longtime and exhausted scout for the Philadelphia 76ers, he gets bumped to assistant coach for half a second before getting bumped back down when the team’s owner dies (Robert Duvall) and his insufferable son (Ben Foster) takes over and sends Stanley out on the road to find that cliched “missing piece” the team so desperately needs.
Sugerman is burned out and his dreams have been dashed. Or as tells his wife (Queen Latifah): “Guys in their 50s don’t have dreams, they have nightmares. And eczema.” So he swallows his pride and drags his suitcase through Europe, looking for potential international draft picks. When he arrives in Spain, he spies a 6-foot9 ringer in Timberlands (Utah Jazz power forward Juancho Hernangomez) crushing it in a street game and walking away with a fistful of cash. That’s one kind of hustle the title is referring to.
There’s another — of a man past his prime who perks up when he spots a diamond in the rough. Stanley is convinced this construction worker named Bo Cruz is his next great find. His boss says no way, so Stanley brings the kid back to the States
anyway on his own dime.
But there’s another kind of hustle at play — of the drive needed to compete at the NBA level. Bo is quiet and inexperienced and sometimes rattled by trash talk. There’s an assault charge from his past that complicates matters. But he has Stanley in his corner, who believes in this kid. And friends, you have yourselves a sports drama.
Sandler’s interest in basketball is well-known and he’s a producer here alongside LeBron James and James’ longtime business partner Maverick Carter. The NBA bona fides extend to the end credits, which are an array of “as himself ” appearances, and yet the movie — directed by Philly native Jeremiah Zagar with a script by Taylor Materne and Will Fetters — feels like the opposite of an insider’s take on the sport.
The stakes in “Hustle” feel nonexistent. The worst that can happen? Bo goes back to working construction in Spain, and Stanley takes that generous sports agent job offered to him early in the film.
Visually there’s not much to grab your eye, but the bigger issues lie with the writing. There aren’t really any characters. It’s a film that doesn’t even rely
on archetypes, it simply populates the screen with people, some of whom occasionally say things. Why waste a talent like Queen Latifah on a role that’s little more than half a dozen lines? And whatever charisma Hernangomez may have in real life as a player on the court doesn’t carry over on screen. He’s likable company, which goes a long way, but he’s not the sort of talent who can compensate for a halfhearted script. That’s more Sandler’s area, and his performance is refreshingly free of anything extraneous, playing a schleppy guy who allowed himself to get a little too bored with things, before putting it all on the line for a late-inlife attempt at something meaningful.
I appreciate that “Hustle” exists in a Hollywood landscape that doesn’t know what to do with movies that aren’t about life-or-death or saving the world. It’s not quite an airball; you won’t find yourself returning to it again and again, either. But there’s a part of me just happy to see non-blockbuster movies about human-scaled dilemmas still getting made.