Some seventeen years after leading his high school basketball team to championship glory, construction worker Jack Cunningham (Ben Affleck) is invited back – this time to coach. Problem is…he has a lot of problems.
Conventional with a capital ‘C’, TWB does little to shake us off the feeling that we’ve seen all of this done before and done better. Whether it’s aping “Hoosiers” (1986) by combining the Gene Hackman and Dennis Hopper characters into one or going step by step through the obligatory transformation of a crappy team into a good one, TWB plays its cliches as often as its cast plays basketball.
That being said, at times, it really clicks. The filmmaking is good, the cast is good, heck, even the basketball scenes are well shot and look like actual games. Yet, we pretty much know where all of this is going and the only real half-surprise is thrown at us in such a clunky way that it dulls much of its impact and ends up feeling like an executive demanded it be included to “sweeten the pot.”
We all love a comeback story and TWB seems to coast on that knowledge for much of the time. That may be the main problem here.
TWB is very much like a star player doing just enough to keep us from booing him, but not enough to get us up out of our seats for a standing O.
