Hustle Review: Adam Sandler’s Underdog Tale Is Bogged Down by Sports Clichés

Hustle doesn’t seem to know how its characters fit into the complicated web of sports, media, and finance that defines the NBA.

Hustle
Photo: Netflix

An underdog tale that feels as if it’s been sanctioned by the NBA, Jeremiah Zagar’s Hustle imputes the meritocratic ethos of professional sports to the corporate bureaucracies on which this multi-billion-dollar industry rests. For all the rousing energy of its hoops action, Hustle has, like so many Adam Sandler vehicles, an insidiously pacifying effect, reassuring us that no matter how much we may be mistreated and disrespected on the job, our bosses will ultimately reward us for our hard work and dedication.

Such is the case with 76ers scout Stanley Sugerman (Adam Sandler), who missed his daughter Alex’s (Jordan Hull) last nine birthdays as he scoured the globe for talent. But his years of living out of hotels and dining on fast food appear to have finally come to an end, as the Sixers’ grandfatherly owner, Rex Merrick (Robert Duvall), has promoted him to assistant coach. The job may only come with a windowless office deep in the bowels of the Wells Fargo Center, but at least it will allow the paunchy ex-college basketball star to live out his dream.

But no sooner has Stanley been given the job than Rex suddenly dies, leaving the organization in the hands of the old man’s petty, egotistical son, Vince (Ben Foster), who harbors a nonsensical grudge against Stanley. Once in power, Vince demotes the newly minted coach back to the scouting grind, promising him that as soon as he finds a star player, he can get his job back. Except that, when Stanley almost immediately finds a promising young recruit named Bo Cruz (NBA baller Juancho Hernangómez) hustling pickup games on the mean streets of Mallorca, Spain, Vince finds any reason he can to reject the prospect.

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Vince is emblematic of the too-easy, undercooked qualities of Will Fetters and Taylor Materne’s script. He’s a pure villain with no plausible motivation for his animosity toward Stanley other than a petty beef surrounding a hotshot German prospect favored by Vince, whom Stanley believed was a bad bet. Certainly, vindictive egotism is an all-too-common phenomenon, but the film never explains why Vince would place Stanley back in the very position where he caused him such grief. Nor does it make us believe that a respected talent scout would so easily accept such an arbitrary and cruel demotion. And if one were tempted to view the Vince as an implicit criticism of dynastic corporate structures, the filmmakers are quick to undercut any such reading with the figure of Vince’s sister (Abby Gardner), the good wealthy scion who exists solely to recognize, and ultimately reward, Stanley’s excellence.

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It’s not that one necessarily expects a feel-good Adam Sandler vehicle to explicate the economic nuances of contemporary pro sports; if one is looking for such a thing, one need only tune their Netflix dial to Steven Soderbergh’s High Flying Bird. The problem is that Hustle doesn’t really seem to know who its characters are, much less how they fit into the complicated web of sports, media, and finance that defines the NBA. Even basic character traits are oddly vague and pliant here. Bo, for one, is introduced as a dynamic, domineering player whose only real flaw is his oversensitivity to trash talk, and yet the relentless montages that dominate the film’s middle section focus less on the mental game than on Rocky-style training tropes like Stanley making Bo sprint up a steep hill every day in the pre-dawn hours.

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That Zagar’s film works at all is testament to Sandler and Hernangómez’s easy chemistry. At this late date in his career, Sandler has mastered the self-deprecating schlub persona that he reliably adopts here, and the actor’s wry world-weariness plays nicely against the naïve provincialism that Hernangómez charmingly embodies. But they’re trapped playing characters whose rough edges have been relentlessly sanded away by Hustle’s formulaic script. Bo’s entry into the NBA is threatened by a past assault conviction, which temporarily suggests some darkness in his past, but the film eventually reassures us that he was merely defending the honor of a woman. His only flaw, it turns out, is that he cares too much.

If Stanley harbors any resentment toward the organization that’s kept him away from his wife, Teresa (Queen Latifah), and daughter for so long, the man certainly never shows it. In the end, Stanley is welcomed back into the Sixers’ fold, and Zagar’s film closes with a lump-in-the-throat scene in which he walks out onto the court for his first game as the team’s newest coach. Sadly, Hustle doesn’t seem to recognize the glaring irony of this moment: of Stanley having traveled halfway across the globe, discovered a once-in-a-lifetime prospect, fought the league and his own team to get him a spot, only to end up back where he was at the start.

Score: 
 Cast: Adam Sandler, Queen Latifah, Ben Foster, Robert Duvall, Juancho Hernangómez, Jordan Hull, Heidi Gardner, María Botto, Ainhoa Pillet, Anthony Edwards, Kenny Smith  Director: Jeremiah Zagar  Screenwriter: Will Fetters, Taylor Materne  Distributor: Netflix  Running Time: 117 min  Rating: R  Year: 2022

Keith Watson

Keith Watson is the proprietor of the Arkadin Cinema and Bar in St. Louis, Missouri.

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