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"He Got Game" Movie Review

From The San Francisco Chronicle

Writer-director Spike Lee's "He Got Game,'' a raucous drama about basketball and the temptations of sudden wealth and fame, is poignant, funny and spiritual.

But his preoccupation with sex and his trashy dialogue work against his powerful story of a father and son trying to come to terms with a tragic past. The good news is Denzel Washington's performance as an Attica prison inmate who is promised a reduced sentence if he can talk his whiz-kid son into playing basketball for the governor's alma mater, the fictional Big State university.

Washington's Jake Shuttlesworth looks tough and hard, an odd but refreshing turn for an actor long associated with handsomely heroic roles.

By the time he gets around to having desperate sex with a battered prostitute (Milla Jovovich) whom he has befriended, Washington hefts a considerable dramatic burden as a sorrowful everyman wronged by passion and a blink of fate.

Jake hasn't a clue what's in store when guards order him to the warden's office for one of the strangest pitches in prison history -- temporary parole, with a catch. His assignment is to get Jesus Shuttlesworth (played by the Milwaukee Bucks' Ray Allen), the No. 1 high school player in America, to spurn all other offers and come to Big State.

It's more than relief from the grim prison that the elder Shuttlesworth seeks. It's a chance to see and talk to the son who hates him for killing the boy's mom in a fit of rage.

Lee is a sentimentalist at heart, and his attention to emotional detail is riveting. The brittle, hard talks between father and son, the flashbacks to times spent shooting hoops -- Lee digs into the soft flesh of feelings and never lets go, despite the asides of explicit sex that occasionally make "He Got Game'' seem like a Playboy production. It's too bad Lee didn't know when to trim. His fixa tion on the tawdry makes this film so clearly R-rated that it may never be seen by its most important audience: the young.

And though it's a pointed examination of today's basketball world of big bucks and perks, the film sends mixed signals. ``He Got Game'' seems to cheer for integrity, honesty and hard work while playing up its own cheap thrills.

Washington's gutsy performance is sweetly counterbalanced by Allen's. The NBA star's soft smile brings a rare warmth to the screen. Allen is naturally disarming, a nonactor whose nonchalance is in itself an affecting realism.