The most beautiful sports movie of all time

Rating: 8/10 (26 September 2001)

We could see just one more story about a man who loves his son, but which suffers from various handicaps, like being on parole and being watched all the time, like having no wife anymore due to killing her, and like his son being one of the most stellar basketball players of his time and this man being truck-loaded with the burden of convincing him to go to college. The film marches to the pace of the two leads, Jake Shuttlesworth (Denzel Washington) and Jesus Shuttlesworth (real-life NBA player Ray Allen, which makes a startling debut), as they have continuous face-offs: Jesus won't accept that he has a father, and won't listen to him, being more interested in becoming an NBA star, as the managers, the limelights, the fame and the fortune keep calling him like the chant of the sirens. Jesus is a young boy with a foot on each side. And he is facing options, choices he will have to make, and traps he will have to avoid. As a friend of his says (in the movie's most memorable quote) "How do you spell pussy? H. - I. - V.". This could be one more tale of choosing between college or fame and fortune, ths could be one more tale of a destroyed father-son relationship, but this is Spike Lee, and the treatment is totally different. It starts with an incredible hommage to basketball, shot like a picture poem, to the sounds of Aaron Copland, whose music flows through the whole movie and makes it look more beautiful and poetic. A characteristic Spike Lee movie, which introduces us to a new way of facing sport dramas. To be cherished.