Before you brand this movie another clich?©d sports drama, let Coach Carter put you in the game.
Set in urban northern California, Richmond High School is filled with troubled youths and a struggling basketball team. Coach Ken Carter (Samuel L. Jackson) is offered the poor-paying and challenging job of reviving a former basketball powerhouse from its previous record of 4-22. Carter's history as a former all-American and Richmond alum holding the school's record in scoring and assists, quickly grabs the team's attention.
Carter changes everything about the team, beginning with transforming the informal style of practice to grueling training sessions filled with hundreds of suicide runs and pushups. He makes each player sign a contract agreeing to maintain a 2.3 grade point average, attend every class, sit in the front row, and wear ties on game day. He also refers to his players as "young sirs" and requires that they show him, and each other, the same respect.
The movie climaxes as the team plays fantastic basketball, winning more than twice as many games as the year before. Carter soon finds out that the players' success in the classroom is far from comparable with their achievements on the court. The coach places a chain on the door to the gym, locking out his players from practices and games. With the biggest game of the season only a week away, a town centered around its basketball team erupts.
The film starts slowly, minimizing basketball and instead focusing on the lives of the players. Kenyon, played by Rob Brown ("Finding Forrester"), gets his girlfriend Kyra (Ashanti, in her big screen debut) pregnant and is torn by his responsibility to her and to his college basketball aspirations. Timo (Rick Gonzalez) is insecure, hostile and angry, constantly worried about living the rest of his life as a drug dealer. Junior (Nana Gbewonyo), the team's dominating center, can barely read an article describing his brilliant play.
Suprsingly, the reason for this movie's success does not lie in the exciting and entertaining basketball scenes. Instead, "Carter's" focus on the lives of inner city kids moves this film out of the simple "sports movie" category and into the class of films which impart an important message. Carter urges his players to believe in themselves both on and off the court, even if their friends and family do not.
Jackson aptly portrays Ken Carter as a charismatic and moral disciplinarian, as tough with his family as he is with his basketball players. As in most of his films, Jackson's character is gruff and angry.
Ashanti certainly stands out from the group of pop stars who painfully try to cross over from music to movies. She does a nice job of illustrating the difficult choices for young women in her situation. Her relationship with Kenyon takes up exactly the right amount of space on screen and is far from the typical, sappy nonsense between a star athlete and his girlfriend.
Other exceptional performances belong to Robert Ri'chard who plays Carter's son and Denise Dowse as the principal of the school. Ri'chard struggles to fit in with his poorer teammates after transferring from private school in order to play for his father. He shows terrific emotion throughout the movie and is very likeable. Dowse is the typical principal. She doesn't have enough money for anything, time to talk to Carter, or an interest in the boys' academic success. Having given up any hope for their academic future, she believes that they must be allowed to play no matter what.
This movie is a terrific balance between "Dangerous Minds" and "The Mighty Ducks." It has the right amount of entertainment and excitement for a sports movie, yet it shows how important an adult figure can be in the lives of troubled youth. Director Thomas Carter (no relation) hammers home a little too hard the point that if the boys fail in school they fail in life. Yet it is a valid one, and is key to understanding what makes "Carter" a slam dunk.
