Like Mike (2002)

Like Mike arrives from 2002 with the confidence of a film that has no argument to make and no interest in starting one. Calvin Cambridge, an orphan in Los Angeles, finds a pair of sneakers bearing the initials MJ, gets struck by lightning while retrieving them from a power line, and is thereafter very good at basketball. That is the entire proposition. The Los Angeles Knights sign him, a mentorship with Morris Chestnut's Tracy Reynolds develops on schedule, and Crispin Glover plays the orphanage director with the sort of theatrical menace that family films once permitted themselves. The cast is largely Black. The film never mentions this. Nobody delivers a speech about it. The story is about shoes.

Any cultural accounting here comes up empty, and the emptiness is genuine instead of evasive. The villain is a greedy man who embezzles from children and wagers against them, which is villainy of the oldest and most reliable kind. It indicts an individual, not an economy. The female characters stand at the edge of the frame and stay there. The weather is a plot device, not a crisis. Nobody learns to love their body. Nobody is diagnosed with anything. Nobody corrects the historical record. The film carries a single message, that teamwork beats selfishness, and it delivers that message in the fourth quarter with a pass to the open man. This counts as preaching, technically, but it is the preaching of the playground, not the seminar room.

We leave such a picture with nothing to file. It is pleasant, it is innocuous, and it has become invisible to the apparatus that now sorts culture into positions. A children's movie that simply wants to entertain children grows harder to find every year. This one does the job and asks for no credit.