Uncle Drew (2018)

Uncle Drew arrives as a feature-length extension of a Pepsi Max advertising campaign, a fact the film never lets us forget, since the corporate parentage is visible in nearly every frame. Kyrie Irving reprises the character he built in those shorts, a septuagenarian streetball legend summoned from retirement to assemble his old teammates for one last Rucker Park tournament. The plot is a familiar scaffold: a humiliated coach, a rival, a prize purse, a van. Director Charles Stone III keeps things breezy. The formula holds.

The cast is almost entirely Black, drawn from the NBA and WNBA, and the Harlem setting is rendered with genuine affection. It would be a mistake to read this as a statement of any kind. The film treats its milieu as backdrop, never as argument, and the racial dynamics of streetball culture go unexamined. The women fare modestly. Lisa Leslie's Betty Lou steps in as the fifth player, and Erica Ash's Maya is competent and kind, but Tiffany Haddish is handed a gold-digging ex-girlfriend and asked to run with it. Nate Robinson's Boots is described as having catatonic schizophrenia, which the film deploys as a running gag about a man who sits motionless until he does not. Aging, out-of-shape bodies are the engine of the comedy, and the film's affection for them is real but unserious.

There is a faint sermon here about community, about respecting elders, about the difference between a man who plays for money and a man who plays for the neighborhood. It lasts roughly ninety seconds. Any appetite for an anti-capitalist reading dies at the first barrel cooler of Pepsi, and the film is honest enough not to pretend otherwise. The remainder is a genial, well-cast, deeply mercenary piece of entertainment that wants nothing more than to sell you a beverage and a feeling. It succeeds at both, and asks for nothing in return but the price of a ticket.