White Men Can’t Jump Throws Up a Brick

One of the easiest ways to defang White Men Can’t Jump, aside from hiring a director that can’t film basketball, is to replace the searing racial and economic tension of the early ‘90s with Kenya Barris’ exhausting (and exhausted) race-relations punchlines. The Black-ish sitcom mogul and his frequent collaborator Doug Hall wrote the White Men Can’t Jump remake, which is an even bigger disservice to its source material than Barris’ Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner riff You People or director Calmatic’s House Party remake. The confused comedy waddles onto the court as confidently as a kid in an oversized hand-me-down jersey. But why would this derivative filmmaking aspire to anything else? It’s all just set dressing for Jack Harlow’s brick of a big-screen debut.
Harlow plays hippy-dippy pill-popper Jeremy, an ex-Gonzaga star with two busted ACLs, who runs into pissed-off pick-up player Kamal (Sinqua Walls), a former high school stud who got busted for busting up a heckler. Both broke, they start up a friendship and enter a basketball tournament to get a life-changing amount of cash. No longer about two hustlers caught up in a cycle of insatiable ego and scraping-by capitalism, 2023’s White Men Can’t Jump is about two barely-sketched ex-ballers trying to reclaim their glorious youth. The unflattering but understandable thematic throughline is trying to live up to your past—something that haunts White Men Can’t Jump’s title more than its characters.
But even if the script had any substance, or if the filmmaking could competently show something as essential as a basketball going from hand to hoop, or if Harlow could act, White Men Can’t Jump would always be picking at the irritating jock itch of its racial politics.
Casting a rapper as the white man who allegedly can’t jump (a suggestion rebuffed as “dated” by said white rapper) requires nuance, and a performer keen to laugh at himself. Woody Harrelson’s embarrassingly corny hayseed might’ve been a stereotype, but with that confrontational stereotype came both self-effacing truth (Harrelson often looks like an uncle who dressed himself at a garage sale, and one ready to throw racist barbs when his temper flares) and the opportunity for subversion. It helps that Wesley Snipes’ put-together family man was roasting him at every turn.
Moving the spotlight from farm boy to culture vulture begs for a more complicated take on racism that sets its sights on modern topics: White liberal denialism and appropriation. But, like other Barris material, it seems intent on using its gentle ribbing to appease rather than interrogate. Jeremy is constantly positive and overly familiar, his racism always harmless and backed up with affirming punchlines. When Jeremy says an opponent looks like Malcolm X, the camera swings around and—sure enough—there are those browline glasses on a guy who was definitely at the audition for One Night in Miami. When Jeremy brings a bottle of Hennessy to a Black child’s birthday party, Kamal’s dad (Lance Reddick) warmly asks for a nip. Harlow’s vocabulary and cadence are painted over by these gags—it’s much easier to dismiss and laugh off his faux pas than to question his entire persona.
The original’s boldness and energy—with real hurt and real yearning for camaraderie playing between two men who share a passion—has been papered over by public relations. Because this is a Harlow vehicle, Kamal exists only as a foil. Walls is reduced to a mannequin, with no retorts to Jeremy’s nonsense other than the occasional deadpan “don’t do that again, bro.” Whenever Jeremy says something about skin color, about bodies, about well-spokenness, Kamal is there to sigh and, eventually, smile. This silly, well-meaning white boy.
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