How else are we going to get Jack Nicholson back on screen? Sander trading Gems‘ banter with Keven Barnett worked so well - why not let him hang with what feels like two-thirds of the NBA’s active roster? This should be a new subgenre: The sports-fan wish-fulfillment star vehicle. If nothing else, this drama definitely builds off of the notion that letting a famous hoops aficionado mix with actual pro ballers equals solid gold. You feel like his time spent with the Safdie brothers resulted in him lending Stanley Sugerman, the movie’s washed-out talent scout for the Philadelphia 76ers, more of a desperate, sad-sack edge it’s definitely the sort of satisfyingly Sandman-in-Winter turn that taps into the same energy their film successfully harnessed. Sandler may not be the sole reason Hustle works, but he’s the one that makes it work way better than it should. (His fictional-feature debut, 2018’s We the Animals, was the sort of woozy, poetic coming-of-age movie that turns being compared to a branch on The Tree of Life into a feature rather than a bug.)īut while teamwork makes the dream work, there’s no question as to which player is the most valuable, or who’s lifting everyone up here. It helps that the movie’s got talent on its side as well, from real-life players dropping sopping wet three-pointers to director Jeremiah Zagar calling the shots for these onscreen shot-callers while adding a ragged, indie vibe to everything. You don’t get this amount of blood, sweat, and NBA backroom verisimilitude onscreen without it. “Obsession wins over talent” is one of the many courtside platitudes you’ll hear - like the genre Hall of Famer Hoosiers, this is a basketball movie that does double duty as a Coaching 101 handbook - and you never doubt that this film has a lot of obsession.

It’s a surprisingly good sports movie that wants little more than to be a surprisingly good sports movie, one that knows it’s working with creaky triumph-of-the-underdog clichés but is willing to do a full-court press to sell them. Hustle, his new movie, isn’t Uncut Gems, not by a long shot. It felt like Sandler was leveling-up without letting go of what made him a star in the first place. It didn’t suggest that the comedian was working outside of his comfort zone so much as he’d aged into a second one, which allowed him to tap into something a little darker and a lot more daring if he wanted to. And then there was Uncut Gems, which remains in a league of its own and managed to synthesize so much of what’s great and grating about Sandler’s screen persona into one brilliant, twitchy time bomb of a character. There were highs ( Punch-Drunk Love, Noah Baumbach’s vastly underrated The Meyerowitz Stories) and lows ( Reign Over Me, The Cobbler). No one’s killing the golden-egg goose.īut when you look back on his career and zero in on the detours into more “serious,” or at least less “goofy-ass, juvenile, weird-as-hell” projects, you can see how the 55-year-old movie star has slowly been building up a portfolio outside of his no-brainer hits. (A friendly reminder: This movie came out in late 2020.) Those are the movies that have earned Sandler nice houses and nine-figure Netflix deals, and far be it from us to criticize how a man butters his very expensive bread.

Oh, Our Patron Saint of the Holy Abbie-Doobie is still making the sort of broad, big-swing comedies he’s always made, still not afraid to channel his inner manchild in the middle of a lysergic sugar-high. Adam Sandler may officially be entering his Blue Period.

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