Where I Watched It: Peacock

English Audio Description?: Yes

I’m a little bit of a sucker for a nice sports drama. It doesn’t really seem to matter what sport, because I have enjoyed golf (The Greatest Game Ever Played), track (Race), swimming (Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken), hockey (The Mighty Ducks), basketball (Glory Road), football (Varsity Blues), baseball (Field Of Dreams), soccer (can I just use Ted Lasso?), and of course bobsledding (Cool Runnings) and whatever Iron Will represents. So, yeah, I liked Shooting Stars.

I’m not saying that I love all sports movies. I wasn’t a fan of The Legend Of Bagger Vance, and there’s at least one Oscar winning film that really tried to make running feel inspirational, but I think I was in the minority who was bored. It had some cool music though.

Here, we basically have an adaptation of more Than A Game, which was a pretty good documentary from a while ago that focused on the high school team that produced Lebron james, and just how good they were. They weren’t just some team, or really even carried by lebron, they were a somewhat assembled team of kids with very specific sets of skills who were like a perfectly oiled machine and came as a package deal.

This movie dives into those relationships a bit more, and we see a bit of the backstory and controversy. Lebron really isn’t even the star here, that is left to Drew (Caleb McLogulin) who is more motivated as the shortest member of the squad. When they start heading for their local high school, and Drew gets an inkling that he’s about to be left behind on the JV team, he goes and finds a private school willing to give him and the other 3 boys scholarships to play ball. Then the story just becomes how do these Freshmen get off the bench and onto the court?

I felt like by keeping Lebron feeling like he was only the second most important member of the team, and focusing so heavily on Drew for as long as possible was what made this film work. Had this been a Lebron film, it would have felt more like a biopic. But, since Lebron is quiet for the first half, it allows Caleb to take over as Drew, and we see that fire and energy coming from the player who has been counted out just because he hasn’t hit the typical height requirement.

All the boys do good work acting, and i hope that visually they look good on the court. I can only speak to the audio description, which does a good job of really nailing the sports angle as much as possible. There are a decent amount of sequences showing them either practicing or playing, and they are all well described. I think what’s interesting here, as I’ve had many conversations with other blind movie watchers, is that so often race is not a factor in the audio description. The idea is that white is the default, and there’s only a need to point out when someone is not. Here these main characters are almost all black, with the exception of Dermot Mulroney, so either through dialogue or description, black is then defaulted, and white or otherwise is what is pointed out. Some films feel the need to do this across the board, and usually those films are about race. Here, no one really cares about race. That’s not the angle of the story they are trying to tell.

I might look back at the end of the year and wonder if this was the right grade, but I honestly have no problems with this film. I think it did achieve what it set out to achieve, and I enjoyed it enough that I’d watch it again, and recommend it to anyone. If I stand alone, that’s fine. But, I also proudly stand alone in thinking Chariots Of Fire is really slow.

Final Grade: A