Dull predictability keeps 'Rebound' on the bench

Friday, July 1, 2005

By WILLIAM ARNOLD
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER MOVIE CRITIC

Every movie season, in one form or another, Hollywood seems to give us at least one remake of "The Bad News Bears," the saga of a dysfunctional coach who's coerced into riding herd on a team of pathetic kids and ends up loving it. It's become a ritual of our culture.

MOVIE REVIEW

REBOUND

DIRECTOR: Steve Carr

CAST: Martin Lawrence, Breckin Meyer, Wendy Raquel Robinson

RUNNING TIME: 86 minutes

RATING: PG for mild language and thematic elements

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The year started out with "Coach Carter," a serious take on the formula; last month, Will Ferrell went through the paces as a soccer coach in "Kicking & Screaming"; and next month will see an official remake of the 1976 movie that started it all.

In the meantime, there's "Rebound," with Martin Lawrence forced to coach an abysmal team of middle-school basketball players. It's an abysmal movie too, though -- a few vomit jokes aside -- it's much less gross than we've come to expect from the genre.

Martin plays coach Roy McCormick, a legendary college basketball guru who has become so corrupted and jaded that he barely bothers to show up for games, and when he does he's so contemptuous of the rules that league officials finally ban him for life.

But his agent (Breckin Meyer) finds a loophole in the league bylaws that says Ray can be reinstated if he coaches in a different league for a reasonable length of time. So the agent sends him back to his old Ohio middle school to oversee its team of impossible losers.

As the movie stumbles along with absolutely no variation in the formula, the only thing that can be said in its favor is that Lawrence's abrasive personality gradually grows on you, and several of the goofy kids are moderately endearing.

But the script doesn't have an ounce of imagination, director Steve Carr ("Dr. Dolittle 2") seems to have been dozing through most of his competition scenes, and the whole enterprise comes off as a desperate, failed effort to save a fading movie-star career.

P-I movie critic William Arnold can be reached at 206-448-8185 or williamarnold@seattlepi.com