A good movie

I already saw this movie but since it was ages ago and since it was available on Disney+, I thought I might have as well check it out again. In contrary to so many movies I watch and forget almost instantly, I did remember this one very well and I enjoyed it just as much when I watched it the first time around when I was a kid about 30 years ago. In fact, back then, street basketball was really popular (it actually made a come-back recently with the 2024 Paris Olympic games), I loved the game, I played it a lot myself and it was just really neat to see a movie focusing on this sport. The fact that it involves only 4 players makes it also actually very cinematic. Sure, it is after all a standard sport feature but even though it did follow the rules of the genre, Ron Shelton managed to add an extra edge to the whole thing and it made this flick actually stand out from the rest. Indeed, even though you get to see some pretty neat basketball action, it is actually not only about basketball, it is actually above all about hustling and the whole hustling thing was seriously neat. On top of that, Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes gave some really solid performances and they had some great chemistry together. The only thing that didn’t work in my opinion was how, completely out-of-the-blue, Gloria did end up in Jeopardy. I mean, Gloria was a solid character and the fact that she was obsessed with this TV-game was a nice touch but that she actually ended up there at some point barely made sense so it was a mistake in my opinion. At least, the way she did dump Billy at the end was pretty much pitch-perfect though. Anyway, to conclude, even though it is not really a masterpiece, this movie is still a huge guilty pleasure of mine and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you like the genre.

7/10