Slamma Jamma : Movie Evaluation
Combining its inspirational and sports-film tropes in hackneyed, unoriginal fashion, Timothy A. Chey’s Slamma Jamma appears to be anticipating its own bad reviews. One of the film’s minor characters is an obnoxious "sports critic" who gets a tongue-lashing from an observer who questions his credentials for commenting about basketball regardless that he’s never played the game himself. Effectively, most individuals have by no means made a movie but they know a bad one when they see one, and that is it.
Not that this effort isn’t earnest and effectively-meaning. Telling the story of a former school basketball star who tries to rebuild his life after spending six years in jail for a criminal offense he didn’t commit, the movie hits its emotional points in a blunt, heavy-handed fashion which will resonate with some viewers. And for basketball fans, it affords the cinematic equivalent of terrific pick-up games often discovered on city courts.
Chris Staples — a five-time world slam dunk champion and former Harlem Globetrotter making his performing debut — plays the lead function of Michael Diggs, newly launched from prison after having unwittingly gotten concerned in an armed robbery that resulted in a fatality. Having discovered faith while incarcerated, Michael returns to his former home, only to search out his loving mom deeply in debt and his youthful brother launched into a life of crime.
Describing himself as a "modified man," Michael by some means instantly finds a job at a grocery store, and encounters former buddies and acquaintances who all greet him with the identical question: "When did you get out?" Despite his travails, he stays free of bitterness, even when discovering that his former fiancée has taken up with his old friend, who’s now earning millions playing within the NBA.
His desperation signaled by eating moldy bread discarded by the shop the place he works, Michael nonetheless finds time to play basketball with new pals and help a pastor restore his dilapidated church. He even manages to win a big sum in a basketball competition, solely to have to offer it up when tragedy strikes. So he prepares to defy the percentages — cue the inevitable training montage — and make a big comeback in a nationally televised slam dunk competition carrying a $1 million prize.
The movie’s hoary, melodramatic plotting and painfully awkward dialogue leave nary a cliché untouched. The principal characters are all both saintly or villainous, with the latter exemplified by a sleazy sports agent (former NFL star Michael Irvin) who declares that the only god he worships is money. Michael’s chief competition within the slam dunk competition is a crew-minimize German athlete who seems like he just stepped out of a Nazi propaganda film about Aryan superiority.
Taking part in a personality so noble in each respect that he feels too good to be true, Staples doesn’t get the chance to convey much more than stoic suffering. But he’s actually obtained attractiveness to spare, and his formidable athletic abilities are on ample display. The rest of the performances can charitably be described as adequate, though Jose Canseco deserves points for his cameo appearance during which he’s seen fortunately taking a bribe to vary a score whereas judging the climactic competition. The technical parts are uniformly subpar, including the horrible cinematography that haphazardly mixes B&W and shade within the flashback scenes. Amazingly, the film was shot by veteran Dean Cundey, whose intensive credits embody Jurassic Park and Back to the Future, and whose work here might solely have been mandated by a group service sentence.
