Here’s an interesting idea, let’s take every cliché from every teen movie to date and package it into yet another idea.
This almost describes “Coach Carter”, starring Ashanti, Samuel Jackson, Debbie Morgan (yes, can you believe it, after the long hiatus and the appearances in ‘Love and Basketball’), and a plethora of unknown talent, written by Mark Schwahn and John Gatins and directed by Thomas Carter II himself. Mr. Carter has brought you such adolescent sophomoric hits as “Save the Last Dance”, and the infamous “Metro” (although I was obsessed with that movie for quite a while, I think it was Eddie Murphy’s threads, excellent choice in the hyper-Versace era.
While this doesn’t quite fit into racial stereotypes purported through such movies as “Save the Last Dance”, and “Othello”, “Coach Carter” does introduce old movie clichés from movies like “Lean On Me” and “Baby Boy”, although when you think it is
going to enter into an all out Directing 101 rut, as such movies like Lisa Faye’s “Mean Girls” does, it turns a corner. You think you’ve seen this movie a million times, yet you truly haven’t. It has something for everyone, those hung up on movies about a mentor helping kids overcome the odds in a ghetto school that everyone has forgotten about, those interested in seeing whether or not a young high-school player is going to stick around to raise his child (see, Spike Lee’s “He Got Game”), even kids turned into would be ghetto basketball superstars. Yet the movie isn’t entirely about any of that.
While I don’t typically recommend teen movies to anyone over 21 this is one of those rare exceptions. Not that Carter has a bad track record, there are even episodes of “Miami Vice” listed in his filmography, and Samuel Jackson is superb in just about every movie that you see him in. While the tagline suggests “It begins on the
street. It ends here”, this movie is about a man who is indeed trying to raise his players above the street mentality of getting by. Perhaps what “ends here”, is the destructive path that they were destined to take, as Carter turns them onto something bigger and better.