The Underdoggs: When You Want the Underdog to Lose
By John Kirk
Rating: D
There’s just no way to sugar-coat this, but The Underdoggs - marketed under the catchphrase “from blunts to runts” - may be the most reprehensible movie I’ve seen on a streaming service. While streaming services have wide latitude, I’d shed flesh to warn others about this one.
Yeah – it’s that bad.
The premise: Jaycen “Two J’s” Jennings (Snoop Dogg) is a former football hero whose career has lapsed into obscurity. After a traffic accident, he is sentenced to community service in the neighbourhood he used to live in, doing park maintenance. While picking up dog crap, he sees a pee-wee football league without a coach and by an extended series of events (ie: he used to date the mother of one of the young players), he is somehow drawn to coaching them. It’s a formulaic start to a film that tanks the formula.
Look, I love a true underdog story. I think that’s universal. But this film abuses the concept of the underdog in a vain attempt to find redemption at the very last of the film. Think of classic underdog sports films - Rudy, The Mighty Ducks, Hoosiers, Cinderella Man … the list goes on. What is the common element that brings these to mind?
We cheered the protagonist.
Sure, there’s some work to liking Gordon Bombay in The Mighty Ducks, but it’s work that’s shared between audience and the characters of the show. The trick is, we know from the onset that there’s good in him and that he’s able to reach redemption. At least Bombay doesn’t call his players “Little Motherf*ckers” every three minutes.
In The Underdoggs, it’s really easy to dislike Jennings - immediately. He’s a failed football star who, for some reason, STILL has exorbitant wealth. He’s completely narcissistic and the only reason he must coach is to prove some sort of personal redemption, sincere or not.
What’s odd is the audience isn’t given much to arrive at that conclusion. By 48 minutes into the film, the inclination is to hate him, even when he hears a young player echo the selfish words he said about the beginning of his own career, an extremely clumsy attempt at self-realization.
This is like Bad News Bears reimagined with bad ideas. Consider that Walter Matthau’s Coach Buttermaker in The Bad News Bears was as broke as the kids he was supposed to coach, a redemption case from minute one. The Underdogg’s Jennings, with his gold-plated Mercedes SUV driving on to the field is about as far away from the kids he’s supposed to help as is the fact that these kids are never going to afford a gold plated Mercedes SUV.
Even the lackadaisical scene where Jennings visits his former coach (George Lopez) fails to impart believability to Jennings’ redemption.
The bonding between the players and coach that signals Jennings’ transformation from selfish former pro-athlete to loving and wise mentor is hurried and completely unauthentic. Just because he’s somehow able to see the mistakes the kids are making in their pursuit of the game doesn’t impart a sense of redemption, it’s more like a sense of resentment. After all, he’s the one with a mansion, a swimming pool and a place where he can take the team for a BBQ-Pool Party after a victory. He just comes off as a hypocrite who did pretty well for himself.
This belies the key to a successful underdog story. The hero has to be a mess, flawed to a point where he or she is just as in need of saving as those he is trying to elevate. Even in The Mighty Ducks Gordon Bombay had lost access to the trappings of fame and fortune, and while this was underplayed, at least he was presented as being on the same level as his team. In Underdoggs, this isn’t the case.
It's hard to relate to Jennings. Even when he tries to reconcile with the former girlfriend he knew in high school, but also when we see the irresponsible way that the kids are overseen in this film. While this may be a reality somewhere, it’s a hard representation for what is supposed to be a light-hearted underdog comedy.
However, the film goes on with supposed acceptance that the way Two Js continues to manage his team is somehow successful. Yet remember when he was only supposed to clean the park? We still don’t know how he somehow graduated to coaching a team that was under the auspices of the parks and recreation department. There’s a considerable suspension of disbelief in this film that we’re supposed to just accept, given the fact that there is no oversight of his social media, his behaviour, his language and the fact that the entire team got drunk – at his residence - while he was also romancing the mother of one of the players.
The underdog formula doesn’t work in this film. Highlighted by Snoop Dogg’s ham-fisted acting, the script really doesn’t allow for any sort of forgiveness of his character’s oversights. It really doesn’t seem like he has learned his lesson. Additionally, there doesn’t even seem to be a reason why his team of underdogs – sorry … Underdoggs, are getting better. The moments of introspection he shares with the team are few and understated. In this film, there is no appreciable reason why they improve.
We all know that kids have to grow up. But films that involve the misguided raising of children is a sensitive topic. Even on film, if you’re raising them wrong for story purposes, there are still limits. Subjecting them to obscene language, alcohol and, referentially, drugs, is a difficult tone to strike in a comedy with kids. The fact that this has-been’s success is somehow linked to theirs smacks in the face of acceptability and authenticity.
Even Kal Penn can’t prevent the failure of this film to entertain – and I’m a big fan of Kal Penn.
The Underdoggs. Directed by Charles Stone III. Starring Snoop Dogg, Mike Epps, Kal Penn, Tika Sumpter, George Lopez, Andrew Schulz, Lovell Gates, Nancy De Mayo. Underdoggs releases on Prime Video Friday, January 26.