Scoured from Hollywood Trash Bins
What trash bin did they dig this movie out of? "Rebound" was the discarded celluloid of every sports movie ever made. It wasn't a movie as much as it was an amalgamation of every sports cliché you can think of. This movie started off abysmally and continued as such until the lamentable predictable ending.Martin Lawrence plays a college basketball coach named Roy McCormick who was a winner once, but is now a rich, flashy, cocky coach who cares nothing about the game anymore; he only cares about his own image. Looking at him you'd think you were looking at a star athlete on a professional team. Not only would he never last as a coach behaving that way, he simply wouldn't BE a coach behaving that way. His very demeanor is anathema to coaching. He dressed like he was going clubbing and he literally missed a game for a photo shoot and sent a recording of a pep talk for the assistant coach to play in the huddle.
Once Coach McCormick got ran out of college hoops, he had one last shot to get back in--coach a team without getting into trouble with the refs, which was something else he regularly did. Through some bait-and-switch that amounted to an e-mail from a Nigerian prince, Roy winds up coaching for his old middle school. The move will allow him to show that he's giving back to the community while proving he can coach without getting into trouble. It could amount to PR gold, but instead the movie goes deeper into absurdity by having Coach Roy be someone who's so cocksure and oblivious that he can't even fake philanthropy. He started off coaching the games while reading a newspaper and flatly insulting his team to a news crew. Even the most self-centered and daft person knows how to put up a front, especially when it's going to help his own image.
As for his team, the Mt. Vernon Smelters, you've seen them a thousand times before. "The Bad News Bears," "The Little Giants," "Major League," "The Sixth Man," "Wildcats," "Necessary Roughness," "Hardball," etc. They were an atrocious group of individuals not fit to be called a team. They were so pitiful it looked as though they only played because they had to. No one would imagine that they actually liked basketball.
"Rebound" went as was expected with some lousy jokes in between. Martin Lawrence clearly didn't believe in the movie as he turned in a lackluster performance. He showed energy and interest once every ten scenes or so (probably what he was contractually obligated to do). The only halfway engaging characters were the two girls who played the announcer and scorekeeper/statistician. This movie could only be worse if YouTube added a bunch of ads to make the movie drag on longer. Oh yeah, that happened too.
And one more thing: why was Katt Williams in the opening credits, yet he had all of five seconds of screen time with no lines! Unacceptable!
score 2/10
view_and_review 12 March 2021
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw6687163/35792
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