Air Bow Wow

Like Mike isn’t a very good movie. The script by Michael Elliot and Jordan Moffet is slapdash and clumsy; John Schultz’s direction is uninspired, and neither he nor the writers can think of anything for some of the actors to do—it takes a strange kind of laziness to waste the talents of Robert Forster, Anne Meara, Eugene Levy and Reginald VelJohnson all in the same movie.

But Like Mike does get one thing right: it’s a kids movie that’s actually aimed at kids, something that’s been conspicuously absent from some of the high-profile “family” films this season. Scooby-Doo had all the drug humor and sexual innuendo that wasn’t in the original show but was, in fact, imposed on it by smart-ass college students in the 1970s and ’80s. Lilo & Stitch had a 6-year-old heroine with an Elvis fixation who listened to his songs on vinyl LPs—as foreign to today’s children as magic lanterns and Edison phonograph cylinders. Hey Arnold! had a character named Deep Voice giving the hero whispered secret information over the phone—an obvious reference to Woodward and Bernstein’s Deep Throat and a double-meaning that, God willing, goes over the head of any kid. These are movies made not for children but (as I’ve said before) for childish adults. At least Like Mike plays to the kids straight on, without coyly winking over their heads at their parents.

Teen rapper Li’l Bow Wow plays Calvin Cambridge, a 13-year-old orphan at an inner-city L.A. group home. One day, in a box of clothes from a Catholic charity, he finds a pair of perfect-fitting sneakers. The nun who gives him the sneakers says the shoes supposedly belonged to “some famous basketball player,” and lo and behold, Calvin finds the initials M.J. written inside one of them. He decides the shoes must have belonged to Michael Jordan (although what a pair of Jordan’s shoes from when his feet were the size of Li’l Bow Wow’s would look like by now is conveniently unexplored). That night, when he and his pals get passes to an NBA game (the team is the fictitious L.A. Knights), Calvin wins a half-time raffle for a chance to go one-on-one with star player Tracey Reynolds (Morris Chestnut).

As he ties up his shoes he whispers a little prayer to let him play “like Mike.” And he does, with a dazzling display of Air Jordan-ry that leaves Reynolds—twice his age and size—chagrinned and embarrassed. Before you can say “nothing but net,” Calvin is a star player with the Knights (on a contract negotiated by his crooked group home administrator, played by Crispin Glover), sparking the lackluster team to a winning season—and rooming with the resentful but basically decent Reynolds.

That’s all there is to the story. Writers Elliot and Moffet throw in all kinds of plot threads without developing them. There’s an amusing scene of Calvin “interviewing” several couples interested in adopting him, but it’s a cheap joke that goes nowhere—in fact, the movie spends more time with each pair of losers than it does with the decent couple who eventually sign the papers. Characters switch around to suit the moment: Calvin has a pal (Jerry Maguire’s Jonathan Lipnicki) who becomes an enemy, and an enemy (Jesse Plemons) who becomes a pal for no reason except that it’s the only way to fill in the running time and keep things moving. And the obviously right ending for the movie (think of Dumbo’s “magic feather”) seems never even to have occurred to anyone.

What Like Mike mainly has going for it is Li’l Bow Wow himself and Morris Chestnut, whose scenes together have comic rhythm and genuine warmth. Li’l Bow Wow carries the film with ease (especially considering what a sloppy mess most of it is), and Morris Chestnut is a generous actor whose self-confidence seems to spread to people who share the screen with him.

And while I’m thinking about it: Why isn’t Morris Chestnut a much bigger star than he is? He has talent, looks and charisma. Is it possible that Hollywood figures they already have Wesley, Denzel and Will, and they just don’t need another black movie star?