#46 Crossover (Wes)

Crossover

I’ve never been a sporty person. I never liked playing it, and have mostly used watching it as an excuse to get drunk. As for sports movies, they’re something I will rarely even consider watching. So you can imagine my enthusiasm when the next movie to rear it’s head was a movie about basketball. Now I actually like basketball as a game, but this far into our list I’ve stopped hoping for Teen Wolf and now just accept that I’m going to get Teen Wolf Too instead…

Tech (Anthony Mackie), Cruise (Wesley Jonathan) and Up (Lil’ JJ) are all members of a streetball (like basketball, but with less rules, and played in street courts) team, that are good, but just can’t beat a rival team called Platinum, led by Jewelz (Hot Sauce). Cruise is a skilled player and is pursued by sports agent Vaughn (Wayne Brady), but wants to pursue a career in medicine, and is worried that playing streetball will affect his scholarship to UCLA, whereas Tech wants to follow the money that a career in basketball promises, and to kick his rivals right in the family Jewelz. Whilst Tech and Up hustle the local basketball courts to make money, Cruise shows off all his medical knowledge by not using any contraception whilst playing Doctors and Nurses and his new found girlfriend Vanessa (Eva Pigford) announces that she’s pregnant. Will this stop Cruise becoming a doctor? Will the team play and finally defeat Platinum? Will Up live to become an old man who has way too many balloons? Have I finally discovered a miracle cure for my insomnia by watching this movie? 

Like I said I don’t really watch many sports related movies, the only ones I can think of that I like (not counting documentaries or martial arts based movies) are Slap Shot, Caddyshack, Cool Runnings, Raging Bull, Rocky, Escape to Victory, Whip It, The Wrestler, Teen Wolf and Happy Gilmore. So out of the hundreds of sports movies made, I like ten, half of which are comedies. That really didn’t give Crossover much chance of impressing me really, the saving grace here could have been rising star Anthony Mackie playing Tech.

Anthony Mackie is a decent actor (in other movies at least). You’d probably recognise him from his performance as Sam Wilson (AKA The Falcon) in various Marvel movies starting with Captain America: The Winter Soldier or possibly from The Hurt Locker or Million Dollar Baby if superheroes aren’t your thing. So the question here, as it’s been pondered so many times with other actors, is how did he end up in such a low grade piece of shit as this?

It was a low budget movie, so obviously he didn’t fly into the air with his eyes replaced by dollar signs (I’m sure that’s what may have happened to Michael Jordan when he was asked to do Space Jam), and he’d had the starring role in a few movies before this, so it wasn’t just the first opportunity for that to happen that led to such a poor decision. Unfortunately this unwise choice also led to him putting in a painfully average performance, which is a shame as a strong performance from him may have lifted this movie just high enough in people’s regards so that Colin and I didn’t have to endure this god-awful movie.

But you can’t blame the failure of a movie on one actor alone, especially when most of the rest of the cast are so inept. Wesley Jonathan wasn’t too bad, but working with a script that could have been written by pulling random tiles from a Scrabble bag really didn’t help. This random script generator also seems to have been applied to the naming of many of the characters in this film. It’s either that or they were named by the 1977 Palitoy marketing division (Stretch, Double A, Big Man, Up, Jewelz, Walrus Man, Hammerhead and Sand People)…

As far as direction goes Preston A. Whitmore II (who also wrote the terrible screenplay) seems to start with fast paced camera shots, which are more reminiscent of Uwe Bolls ham-fisted attempts to be edgy than anything else. My original tweet when watching this movie was “This is like watching Guy Ritchie’s take on a basketball themed Masterchef with added whoosh effects for every camera move.” However a mixture between a cheesy soap opera, a 90’s Nickleodeon show and a low budget music video soon replaces this motion sickness inducing camera work. Even the basketball scenes lack the excitement they should have and end up being little more than a montage of slow motion slam-dunks which make you yearn for the days of werewolves and cartoon rabbits doing this.

Surprisingly it wasn’t really the sport angle of this film that left me cold, it’s just a boring movie in general. This seems completely at odds with the basketball/streetball angle of the movie, as it’s such a fast paced sport, the pace would have been better suited to a movie about cricket. In basketball terms this movie is a flagrant foul that leads to a rimshot. Avoid this like you would a backcourt violation.