Release Date:
01/14/2005
Staying in school may not make you a rap star or a millionaire athlete or get you laid every night by a different gold-digging bimbo
What were we talking about again? Oh, right, Coach Carter, which scores with another sweaty performance from Samuel L. Jackson and drives home a moral that's all too apt at a time when prep schoolers are skipping calculus to hammer out details on their Nike contracts; namely that a student-athlete is a student first, an athlete second.
Unfortunately, when Coach Carter the character (Jackson) tries to instill these values in a California high school basketball team full of thugs, as you would expect, the whole community bands together to get him firedbut Coach ain't goin' down before some lessons are learned. (Mainly that you can't be a pissed-off teen from the 'hood without maintaining a ratio of at least one "deeeamn" per every two minutes of screen time.)
But whats a classic sports movie without its merry cast of zany bit parts? Youll be able to find someone on Carters team to identify with, be it the hoodrat gangsta who cant stay out of trouble off the court or the team superstar, who simply cant stay in class at all. In the middle of the action is Carter himself, and Jackson's performance is reason enough to stay in the stands until the final buzzer.
Before Coach proves his point by suspending the entire team halfway through an undefeated season because of grades, Coach Carter sprints through a flurry of sneaker-squeaking hoops action that makes real NBA games look like your local gyms three-on-three tourney.
At the center of the story are a host of inspirational lessons from Jackson on everything from unnecessarily taunting your opponent during a game to unnecessarily screaming your lines during a movie. Once the sports stops, the motivational speeches take over, but Jackson's passion demands your attention as he whips these kids into fine young gentlemeneven if a PG-13 rating forces him to do so without a single one of his patented "motherfuckers."
Unfortunately, when Coach Carter the character (Jackson) tries to instill these values in a California high school basketball team full of thugs, as you would expect, the whole community bands together to get him firedbut Coach ain't goin' down before some lessons are learned. (Mainly that you can't be a pissed-off teen from the 'hood without maintaining a ratio of at least one "deeeamn" per every two minutes of screen time.)
But whats a classic sports movie without its merry cast of zany bit parts? Youll be able to find someone on Carters team to identify with, be it the hoodrat gangsta who cant stay out of trouble off the court or the team superstar, who simply cant stay in class at all. In the middle of the action is Carter himself, and Jackson's performance is reason enough to stay in the stands until the final buzzer.
Before Coach proves his point by suspending the entire team halfway through an undefeated season because of grades, Coach Carter sprints through a flurry of sneaker-squeaking hoops action that makes real NBA games look like your local gyms three-on-three tourney.
At the center of the story are a host of inspirational lessons from Jackson on everything from unnecessarily taunting your opponent during a game to unnecessarily screaming your lines during a movie. Once the sports stops, the motivational speeches take over, but Jackson's passion demands your attention as he whips these kids into fine young gentlemeneven if a PG-13 rating forces him to do so without a single one of his patented "motherfuckers."