NEW RELEASES
A New Rocky for the Ages How Adam Sandler’s Hustle delivers the game winning shot we all need right now By Michael J. Pallerino
the NBA’s next international sensation. That is where he finds Bo Cruz (the Utah Jazz’s Juancho Hernangómez) playing pick-up at a park in Spain. It also is where the story shifts from the all too real life of an NBA scout to a story of redemption, promise and friendship. To call Hustle just another slam dunk sports movie is too easy. Sure, there are recurring scenes of Sugerman having Cruz run up a residential hill in Philly (the real and only nod to Rocky ). And while the montages of Cruz working out and doing surreal, hand-eye dribbling drills
Queen Latifah
with tires, plungers and wall-mounted blinking lights are all real training techniques, the buddy drama between ever-fiery coach and oft-brooding player is where Hustle shines. There are no “show me the money” moments or “million dollar arms,” no big game where the winner is the last one standing. And while there
Juancho Hernangómez and Adam Sandler
Photos courtesy of Netflix
are antagonists, including a masterful performance by the Minnesota Timberwolves’ Anthony Edwards, playing a rival draftee, and a screen crush of basketball royalty, old and new—including Julius “Dr. J” Erving, Kenny Smith, Jay Wright, Trae Young, Kyle Lowry and a list too many to name— Hustle is about heart. It is about what happens when people with the same dreams but from different sides of the physical and cultural world collide. It is about what the human body and mind are capable of when everything else says the odds are against you. And while Hustle is not meant to rewrite the sports movie genre, it is designed to make you root for the people you should root for. Heart. Desire. Failure. Redemption. Empathy. Family. These are all the themes that race through Hustle —race so fast and so hard that you cannot help to grab hold. In Hustle , we have a movie that once again makes us believe that every once in the while, the good guys can— and should—win. But not in the way that Hollywood traditionally tends to send us, but one in which dreams come in all different shapes, sizes and victories. Sometimes, winning is just finishing what you started.
worth–be it in two different, but very similar ways. Stanley Sugerman (Sandler) is an in- dispensably talented international scout for the Philadelphia 76ers. Spending his life on the road, he travels from country to country in search of the uni- corn of future NBA players. And while he loves the game, the road he can do without. Missing his wife (Queen Lati-
T here is a ring of familiarity to Adam Sandler’s new movie, Hustle . It’s just not the ring you expect. In everything from the story line (un- derdog hero(s) fighting against all odds), the setting (the streets of Philadelphia), the inspi- rational training montage (underdog hero(s) training against all odds), Hustle , on Netflix, is the new Rocky —sorta, kinda. So, much like the (no-there-is-absolutely-no-rela- tion-to-Rocky) inference to Philadelphia’s other (root- because-it-is-easy-to-root for) heroes, Hustle is the kind of movie where the characters central to the movie’s theme are explicitly tied to the outcome defining their
fah) and teenage daughter, Sugerman is searching for the final piece to the 76ers championship puzzle—a piece that will finally get him off the road and on the bench as an assistant coach. Operating within a world with characters like the father-like figure, owner Rex Merrick (Robert Duvall), Merrick’s smug-without-pretense son, Vince (Ben Fos- ter), and loving daughter Kat (Heidi Gardner), Sugerman is recruiting on borrowed time (his own). Spoiler ahead… After drafting the wrong player, a death, a resulting change of ownership and the betrayal of a promise made, Sugerman is sent back on the road to once again find
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42 | THE GEORGIA HOLLYWOOD REVIEW | FALL 2022
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