For Kamal, that was a high-school incident in which he punched out a taunting fan, and for Jeremy, it was a series of knee injuries that sabotaged his college career at Gonzaga.Īs in Shelton’s original, they meet at a pick-up game, with Kamal assuming that Jeremy-who wears colorful parachute pants, headbands and socks with sandals-is a clown, and getting hustled for his race-colored assumption. There isn’t a single change in Calmatic’s White Men Can’t Jump that isn’t for the worse, beginning with the fact that its Black-white protagonists-Kamal (Sinqua Walls) and Jeremy ( Jack Harlow)-aren’t professional hustlers, but former basketball phenoms whose paths to the NBA were derailed by respective calamities. The world didn’t need a new White Men Can’t Jump, much less one without the direct involvement of creator Shelton, and the end result is a movie (debuting on Hulu on May 19) that even fewer will want to endure. Nonetheless, given that we’re in a current age of endless streaming reboots and expansions of notable hits, it’s now been reimagined by black-ish’s Kenya Barris and director Calmatic (fresh off his House Party do-over) with the same title, two infinitely less magnetic actors, a schmaltzier and more unbalanced story, and a few contemporary references that are meant to pass as updates. White Men Can’t Jump was a natural outgrowth of its particular era and its post-Rodney King, pre-L.A. street basketball culture and, with it, the fever-pitch racial dynamics of early 1992.Ī film about hustling, manhood, teamwork, and the way in which two perfectly matched athletes can make sweet music on the court, it was a critical and commercial success built on the chemistry of its leads and the prickly, sexy, and charged prose of its writer/director. In that list one must also include White Men Can’t Jump, a buddy-comedy pairing of Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes that amusingly navigated the ins and outs of L.A. In the ’80s and ’90s, no one made sports movies as lively, authentic and full of likably colorful characters as Ron Shelton, be it the rambunctiously romantic Bull Durham, the caustic Cobb, the charming Tin Cup, or the punchy Play It to the Bone. Photo Illustration by Erin O'Flynn/The Daily Beast/Hulu
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