In a certain way, screenwriters Taylor Materne and Will Fetters don’t entirely escape the structure of the sports-based redemption drama in Hustle. In a few important ways, though, they, director Jeremiah Zagar and star Adam Sandler do elevate the material here. The story is fairly simple when boiled down to the essentials: The washed-up basketball scout finds the ace he can place up his sleeve, just as everything seems to be crashing down around him. In a very general way, the movie establishes certain expectations for itself and follows through on nearly all of them. In a more specific way, the filmmakers have given us an ensemble of characters who could not fit more perfectly in this narrative, which means that they have been afforded a depth which could have been sidestepped in favor of false melodrama.
Nearly everything about Zagar’s approach is dialed back to such a degree that the Big Game, to which all of this seems destined to lead, actually happens in an epilogue set five months after the main action. Even then we are being led into the credits and an absolute barrage of cameos by current and retired basketball stars playing themselves. What the film seems to be saying with this decision, then, is that the Big Game barely matters within the context of the story being told about the scout and the burgeoning star player. This story is far more about them than their accomplishments, particularly with regard to the lives of regret and pain and anxiety they lead.
For Sandler’s Stan Sugarman, a former player for the Philadelphia 76ers who now scouts on their behalf, regret lay in lost opportunities – both to represent his team as best he could and to become a coach now that he has reached the middle of his life. The team’s owner, Rex (Robert Duvall), is sympathetic to Stan’s plight, which was exacerbated by a season-ending injury early in his career. Rex’ son Vincent (Ben Foster), though, doesn’t like Stan very much, and when the old man dies, leaving Vincent to run things, the promise of even an assistant coach position for Stan seems far off in the future. He has a daughter to look after, too, and a wife, Teresa (Queen Latifah), whose sturdy support of his dream is a refreshing change of course for a character like hers.
Enter Bo Cruz, hailing from Spain and played by Juancho Hernangómez (real-life power forward for the Utah Jazz), whom Stan eyeballs as a potential recruit after noticing his skill on an amateur court in a game with money on the line. Much of the rest of the film is comprised of Stan’s attempts to convince Bo of his prospects in major league basketball and Vincent of the fact that he won’t embarrass himself or the management of the 76ers. The rest of it, of course, is made up of various montages of Bo’s training regimen, as well as at least two rounds in “the Combine,” a televised audition process meant to ingratiate new recruits to the members of their prospective team.
That last part, of course, is where the drama resides for Bo, who faces down a veteran player (Anthony Edwards – the shooting guard for the Minnesota Timberwolves, not the “ER” actor) with a major attitude problem, and Stan, especially when the veteran players rather humble his new recruit with their skill. Again, none of this is particularly new or a reinvention of the wheel. It’s involving, though, particularly for the performances from Hernangómez, who impresses with his naturalism onscreen, and Sandler, entirely divorcing himself of the Big Characters he usually tackles in his comedies for a restrained and even weary turn.
The many cameos are entertaining, such as the prolific Kenny Smith as a former teammate of Stan’s and Julius Erving (appearing as himself in a most helpful fashion), but Zagar wisely doesn’t lean too heavily on anyone’s meta-referential involvement in this fictional story. Hustle is smarter and more driven by character than to fall into that trap.
Photo courtesy of Netflix
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