Coach Carter

Coach Carter (Director: Thomas Carter)

Thomas Carter apparently has no relation to Ken Carter, the coach portrayed in this film. Carter's notable credits are mostly on TV, with "Fame," "Hill Street Blues," "Remington Steele," "St. Elsewhere," "Miami Vice," and others. His best-known film credits are Swing Kids and Save the Last Dance.

Do I rate a movie poorly if it has no original value, but has got a great message and a dynamic lead performance? I think you'll be seeing a lot of 2 to 3 stars with this film. The other thing is that it's extremely long for this type of movie. This film, which combines a little Hoosiers and a little Lean On Me, could have used a little more editing.

The story comes right out of all the revolutionary-new-hire-at-a-bad-school films you've ever seen. Ken Carter (Samuel L. Jackson) comes to California's Bay Area Richmond to be the new basketball coach for the sorry Oilers, who in the previous season won 4 games. His no-nonsense methods ask for his team to be extremely conditioned (suicides, push-ups!) and to be in class and maintain a 2.3 GPA (higher than the state requires to play basketball--conflict!). We have our usual group of troubled kids, mixed in with some that already have their act together (including Carter's son, Damien, played by Robert Ri'chard), who do what Carter says to keep playing basketball, which is, in the Hoosiers model, what most of these kids have going for them.

The great thing about the movie is Coach Carter's insistence about grades. He truly wants black kids to overcome a system that expects them to fail. He is not necessarily satisfied by the undefeated season Richmond begins to enjoy. I especially liked seeing him chain the gym, forfeiting games, until the situation improved, despite hundreds of angry people wanting to hurt him for doing so. Jackson's performance here is one of the best of his recent movies.

Yeah, but the movie is nothing new, though, despite the goodness that can be had. The basketball scenes have a couple of crowd-pleasing moments, but remember when Hoosiers goes through the Indiana tournament just before the championship? There's no real sense of sport here; games that are highlighted have a different message to them--this is the game where they start to showboat, much to Coach Carter's chagrin...this is the Bay Hill Tourney where they win and then go sneak out of their hotel to a party and drink and have sex, much to Carter's chagrin...and then the lesson has to be taught. Once you've been sitting in the movie over 2 hours, you'll also realize that Richmond's journey through the California playoffs is not going to be Hoosiers-like.

Yes, there are inspiring wins. Yes, of course, there's a moment when everyone wants Carter fired. Yes, there are subplots involving the lives of the players off the court (girlfriend's got a baby on the way, thug life on the streets, etc.). Yes, people threaten Carter. Yes, people reach out to Carter.

As for the run time (136 minutes), some people just complain a movie is too long without citing what could have been cut. I would have cut a chunk of the time spent on the off-court antics, especially Kenyon Stone (Rob Brown) and Kyra (Ashanti), who are a high school couple expecting a baby. We know Stone isn't ready for it, and we know that causes friction, but we have two huge scenes that are constructed to tell us what we already know (In other words, had those scenes not been in the movie, we would not have missed them). I probably would have trimmed a lot of that party scene--I would have skipped all the sneaking out and going to the party, and just left the part in where Carter discovers them gone and searches for them. There's a flow that could have been achieved, a better experience I feel, if some of that could have just been let go--and the messages would remain intact.

So again, hard to fault a movie for trying to be positive, and focus on someone who tried to change the system for the better. It is not a bad movie. There are just other films that have explored this before, and this one just combines all of them. The movie could be described as a student-athlete, and as Carter says, "Student comes first."