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"He Got Game" Movie Review

By Tom Gliatto

Bottom Line: An ambitious effort scores more often than it misses (R)

Spike Lee just may be the most exciting, energizing and exhausting American filmmaker working today. The guy is talented, audacious, and he has plenty to say. Too much, in fact. Like many of Lee's movies, He Got Game piles on issue after issue until the movie weakens under the weight.

Lee's latest effort, which he wrote and directed and which draws on his much publicized love for basketball, is not a great film, but it sure is trying and comes, at times, exhilaratingly close. Game tackles two major themes: the need for reconciliation between a father (Washington) and son (Allen) after the father has killed the boy's mother, and the emotional and big-money pressures facing top athletes today. The two themes overlap when Washington is furloughed from a state prison for a week to persuade his son, the nation's No. 1 high school hoops star, to play for the governor's college alma mater. The son, understandably, wants nothing to do with his father.

Much in the movie is first-rate: Malik Hassan Sayeed's ravishing camera work, the bold mixing of Aaron Copland and Public Enemy on the soundtrack, Washington's portrayal of the sadder-but-wiser dad, and the surprisingly solid performance from acting rookie Allen, who, off-screen, works as a guard for the NBA's Milwaukee Bucks. These premium elements only serve to make Lee's excesses (surplus subplots, overkill on cameos by real college coaches and NBA stars, and endless closeups of women's naked breasts) all the more exasperating.