She Ball Parent Guide

The Inglewood Community Center is a pillar of the local neighborhood, offering children an opportunity to play and study away from the gangs on the street. Avery (Nick Cannon) has poured everything he has into keeping it up and running, hoping that the center will provide kids better opportunities that he had and keep them out of prison. But the Center is an old building, and it has developed some expensive problems. The only hope Avery has at raising the money he needs to fix the Center is a three-on-three street basketball tournament – but for that, he’s going to need a team. Luckily for him, his sister’s friend Shelby (Melody Rae) is available and is an excellent basketball player. It’s not going to be easy: Shelby’s going to need to play catch-up to learn how the game is played on the streets in Inglewood.

You might think that you know this movie from that synopsis, or from the trailer. It sounds like so many other sports movies. Where this one differs is that none of the stuff I just told you happens until the third act. The first two alternate between social commentary about the problems which face lower-income communities in America and the really, really boring romantic subplot.

Surprisingly, my biggest issue with this movie isn’t the dreadful pacing, it’s the awful depiction of women. Despite the title, this film very little to do with women’s basketball after the first half hour – a time period less devoted to sport and more to glamour shots of women in suggestive athletic wear doing “stretches” in slow-motion. And that’s before we get to the strip club. Believe it or not, I’m not thrilled when a film assumes that I’m some glassy-eyed drooling pervert incapable of watching women play sports without being able to sexually objectify them first. This is not an uncommon assumption, seeing as the European Handball Association recently decided the same thing about Norway’s female team, but it is still a disturbingly misogynistic one.

This movie has a major identity problem. It needs to decide if it wants to be a heartfelt look at a struggling community, or a raunchy comedy about basketball. It’s not impossible to be both, but She Ball certainly isn’t doing either terribly well. I mean, it’s a better basketball movie than Space Jam: A New Legacy, but that’s hardly an endorsement, is it?