Friday, August 22, 2008

Movie review: The Longshots

Jock without a jockstrap.

By John P. Meyer

The Longshots

When Curtis Plummer, a down on his luck former high school football star, takes the only job he can find--babysitting his misfit niece Jasmine--he discovers that she has the skills that once made him a great quarterback. The only place these two opposites get along is on the field, so Curtis is determined to turn Jasmine into the star of the local team, The Minden Browns, and get his own stride back by becoming the coach. The boys on the team don't want her but when this girl quarterback shows them she's got the skills, she'll turn their whole world upside down.

Source: Cinema Source

• Showtimes and more on The Longshots

As you can clearly see, Jasmine Plummer is a real young lady. (You can say the same thing about Keke Palmer, but we already knew that.)

Jasmine's claim to fame relates to her status as the first ever person of the female persuasion to play quarterback on a Pop Warner Junior Pee Wee league team. Furthermore, by all accounts (including the one presented in this fictionalized film story) she played quite well, thank you very much.

Limp Bizki frontman Fred Durst directs Ms. Palmer in her portrayal of Ms. Plummer in The Longshots, working from a script by TV writer/producer Nick Santora. Co-starring with Keke is Ice Cube. Mr. Cube acquits himself well in the role of Jasmine's uncle Curtis, a former high school footballer who's lately fallen into a species of benign alcoholism as a result of having lost his steady employment in the post-industrial burgh of Minden, Illinois.

Jasmine, as we first encounter her in the movie, is an inward and under-motivated young lady with a serious case of head-in-a-book syndrome. She's at that awkward stage when she'd like to be participating in school events and hanging out with fellow students, but is leery of initiating such forays for fear of being rebuffed. It's a self-confidence thing.

A man needs a good hat. And a girl needs a good football.

Part (and probably the primary part) of Jasmine's insecurity stems from the fact that her father Roy (Malcolm Goodwin) has gone off and left her and her mom (Tasha Smith, as Claire) to fend for themselves. Since Claire is often not home from work in time to meet her daughter after school, she enlists shiftless brother-in-law Curtis to assist with the walking-home and dinner-making duties. Reluctantly - and only because Claire offers to pay him for his lackadaisical services - he agrees.

Predictably, Curtis and Jasmine prove less than companionable at the outset of this arrangement. From Curtis' point of view, his niece seems ungrateful for all the good things in her life: a loving mother, food on the table, a public education, robust good health, etc. For her part, Jasmine sees Uncle Curtis for the bum that he is - and smells him, too. We can't blame her for being stand-offish towards her reluctant unc, whose idea of fixing dinner is to put out bowls for the cereal.

It's by accident that Curtis discovers Jasmine's ability to throw a football, but once discovered things start to change for both of them - they connect in their shared desire to see just how far her talent can advance. At first, this is limited to demonstrations of her passing accuracy for a small group of spectators comprised of Curtis' drinking buddies. Curtis positions chairs draped with posters of familiar pop stars for Jasmine to target ("hit Beyoncé in the flat!"). She's dead-on.

Cleaning up his own act in order to improve upon hers, Curtis soon has Jasmine hitting him on various out patterns. All this leads, of course, to her tryout for the local Pop Warner team, the Minden Browns. Surprise: the boys don't want her, but when it's demonstrated that she can throw rings around their current QB - and, perhaps more importantly, shows that she can take a hit without breaking into tears - they reconsider.

Jasmine gets her own private locker room, which is actually a janitorial storage closet. Aside from this, no special allowances are made for her, and she begins leading her team to one victory after another. From out of left field (to mix sports metaphors) emerges her prodigal father Roy; having heard that she will soon be traveling to Florida to play in the national championships, he's decided there might be some profit in renewing the relationship. What a champ.

"Remember, girl, down-and-out does not refer to your uncle."

An amusing subplots involves Curtis' tentative and inept wooing of one of Jasmine's teachers, Ms. Macer (TWU alumna - and ex-Dallas Cowboy cheerleader - Jill Marie Jones).

Familiar character actor Matt Craven plays an assistant coach on the Minden team, while ex-SNL'er Garrett Morris stands in as Reverend Pratt, the hometown preacher.

The movie pulls all the right feel-good strings, and though there's nothing particularly thrilling about the plot, director Bizkit (er, I mean Durst) does in fact deliver the family-friendly goods. Ice Cube turns in a likable performance as the bum turned role model, and Keke Palmer impresses mightily as a young actress with a genuine talent. The fact that she spent several weeks training with an actual football clearly shows in her gameplay scenes.

There are a couple of tough-love lessons embedded in the tale, too, such as: 1. you can't always win the game, and 2. sometimes it's the wrong play to believe in someone.

I'm giving this PG-rated, happy-ending, 94-minute flick an unqualified "laces up" for folks who want an uncomplicated, inoffensive good time at the movies.

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