Uncle Drew

2018 movie based on a commercial

Rating: 9/20

Plot: An old school street basketball legend reemerges and gets the old team back together to help a coach bring home a championship.

Did you know there was a TV movie based on the Mean Joe Greene Coca-Cola advertisement where he gives a kid a bottle of the soft drink? It has Henry Thomas, that kid from E.T., in it. I didn't, but I came across that when doing some research to see if there's ever been a good movie based on a television commercial. Apparently, Bugs Bunny and Michael Jordan met on tiny television screens before they worked together for the big screen in Space Jam. I don't know if I'd consider that a good movie though.

I enjoyed the Uncle Drew Pepsi commercials because I was fooled into thinking it was guerrilla filmmaking, that the onlookers didn't know this old fart in a sweatsuit was actually an NBA all-star. And there was something fun about watching an elderly guy breakin' the ankles of these punk kids. And yes, I'm only using terms like "breakin' ankles" because I think it might make you all think I'm hip. Anyway, the Uncle Drew commercials--or at least the first one--really worked. But could it work for a feature-length film?

That answer would be no. Aside from being my second movie in a row that has a reference to Gladys Knight and the Pips, I never really had any interest in anything that was going on here. Even the basketball scenes bored me because they lacked the energetic surprise of the original commercial. Characters barely responded to Uncle Drew's team being elderly with the exception of a few mean-spirited jokes about old people.

Lil Rel Howery, the friend in Get Out, brings all of his trick (that's not a typo--he's only got a single trick) to the table as the guy who's arguably the main character. He's good at being louder than most of the other performers in the movie, and that's about it. Nick Kroll steals nearly every scene that he's in, but I don't mean that in a good way. It's like he steals the scene, runs off to the woods with it, beats it against a few trees, and then returns it. The basketball players succeed when they're doing things on the basketball court that a limited section of the population can do. But I noticed there was an "acting coach" in the credits, and that individual needed to do a better job of helping these guys and gal convince me that they were an old person with actual human emotions. They all were apparently told that talking in a barely intelligible grumble would be enough to make them sound old. There's a random dance-off thrown into the mix, likely because the makers needed to fill some time; Shaquille O'Neal gets to show the world his bare ass; and Chris Webber gets to play around with a fake baby that is the most obvious fake baby I've seen since American Sniper.

Everybody seems to be having an absolute blast, and that kind of energy can be infectious. Maybe it was for some people watching this, but I've apparently had my shots.

Attempts to give this sports comedy some heart fall completely flat. There's a half-assed attempt to throw in some stuff about old vs. new ways, friendship, and redemption, but all it manages to do is be a little funnier than the parts of this that are supposed to be comedic.

This also loses a full point for having bad chess. That's a pet peeve.

Product placement should be expected in a movie based on a commercial. Along with Pepsi, this advertises for Nike, Footlocker, and Aleve, the latter which I could have used after hearing Lil Rel Howery scream at me for over an hour and a half.

I will say this--Dikembe Mutombo is a treasure. He's seen a couple times in a poorly-done ESPN documentary spoof at the beginning.

Random note: I may have been in a bad mood during this movie because of some annoying kids in the theater with me. They came in toward the end of the previews, very politely asked a couple a few seats down from me if they could move closer to me so that they could all sit together, and then sat together and made a bunch of noise the entire time. I would have been pissed if I was one of the people who moved for them.