Hustle

Hustle centers on a basketball scout named Stanley Sugarman (Sandler), who works for the Philadelphia 76ers. When he's promoted to assistant coach—and then ...

Some play themselves, some play fictional characters and some only appear for a matter of seconds. Instead of cringe-worthy comedy, it’s a feel-good story about determination. When he’s promoted to assistant coach—and then demoted back to scout—he sets out to find the best rookie basketball player the NBA has ever seen.

Queen Latifah, Juancho Hernangomez, Robert Duvall, and Ben Foster co-star in Hustle, a sports drama about a basketball scout finding his way back to his ...

Between the sincerity shared by Sandler and Hernangomez and the high-level craft, Hustle provides enough diversions to hoist our hearts high, even if we wind up craving more specificity from these characters and their travails. And while the movie partly suffers for it, Hustle is still effectively tender. (Why none of these athletes spot the 6’9” Bo as a ringer stretches the imagination.) Bo is a single father who wants a better life for his young daughter, Lucia, and uses basketball as a solution. Hustle is decidedly glitzier and bigger than Zagar’s previous film, the critical indie darling We the Animals. It deploys an all-star ensemble, ingenious camerawork, and sharp editing to uplift a cliché story about earnest fatherhood and distant hoop dreams. But Stanley is tired of the road. And Sandler as weary NBA scout Stanley is the film’s rousing compass.

Adam Sandler's love of basketball makes all the difference in Jeremiah Zagar's sports drama, Hustle.

Of course, with this type of sports/training/mentor film, Hustle can’t help but fall into the occasional cliché, yet that focus on support and care and a dedication to helping others reach their potential make those platitudes go down a bit easier. Again, through the performance as Stanley, we can feel Sandler’s deep love for basketball coming through, a passion that feels earnest when coming from Sandler. This doesn’t feel like just acting, this feels like a genuine part of who he is. While Will Fetters and Taylor Materne’s screenplay is hitting many of the trainer-trainee tropes one would expect from a sports film, and Zagar’s direction fills Hustle with one too many training montages, they also turn this dynamic into an affecting relationship about two men who desperately need someone to believe in them and find that in each other. Stanley thinks he finds what he's looking for with a one-on-one basketball hustler, Bo Cruz (Juancho Hernangomez), who takes to the court in boots and lives with his mother and daughter. But as the team turns over to the manager’s son (Ben Foster), Stanley is sent back on the road, with promises that if he finds the team’s missing piece, he’ll be back in the coaching gig. He’s tired of spending weeks on the road, looking for the next great thing in basketball, and when the team’s owner (Robert Duvall) offers him an assistant coach position, it looks like he’s finally where he’s wanted to be for so long.

"Hustle" doesn't score any points for originality. Yet Adam Sandler's latest Netflix film -- produced with, among others, LeBron James -- mostly works in ...

, Sandler is in his element as the shambling scout with a wealth of knowledge at his disposal but not always the courage to speak up. They include, but aren't limited to, Julius Erving, Dirk Nowitzki, Doc Rivers, and TNT's Kenny Smith, the last actually playing a character and, like Hernangómez, doing a perfectly fine job of it. Here, Sandler's Stanley Sugerman is a well-traveled scout for the Philadelphia 76ers, who stumbles on a streetball hustler in Spain, Bo Cruz (NBA player Juancho Hernangómez), whose lockdown defensive skills prompt Stanley to describe the guy more than once as being "like Scottie Pippen and a wolf had a baby."

Adam Sandler has found a surprising new niche: movies in which he acts alongside NBA power forwards featuring scenes at Celtics-Sixers games.

In an interview with a Spanish newspaper, Hernangómez said that the Celtics had “super-selfish players” and featured “no team-building.” The Celtics traded Hernangómez on January 19, and immediately began one of the greatest midseason turnarounds in NBA history. But here’s the strange thing: Despite the fact that Smith is an agent, Inside the NBA still exists in the Hustle universe—there’s a scene in which Barkley and O’Neal are shown on TV advocating for Cruz to get an invite to the combine. The Sixers are just about the only team mentioned until the very end of the movie—when Celtics GM Brad Stevens shows up to scout Cruz. Stevens immediately takes a liking to Cruz, and in the final scene of the movie, it’s revealed that the Celtics are the ones to snag him. Then they dumped their surprise movie star from the back of their bench and went on to make the NBA Finals. Everything worked out really well for the Celtics here. They were 23-23 when Hernangómez left the team, but went on a 28-8 run to finish the season 51-31 and are now in the NBA Finals. Hernangómez began the 2021-22 season on the Celtics, so it was easy for the filmmakers to get footage of “Bo Cruz” playing in the NBA—they just filmed a Celtics game. The Orlando Magic center appears in the movie’s opening minutes as a prospect named Haas who plays for German club Alba Berlin—the team Wagner actually played for before coming to the United States. Sugerman doesn’t like what he sees, warning the Sixers to stay away from Haas due to a lack of work ethic and other negative personality traits. (Unlike Edwards, Wilts went to Kentucky—even in a highly dramatized fiction, the idea of a top draft pick out of the University of Georgia is really weird.) Edwards takes great pleasure in getting into Cruz’s head, and really sells the smirking glee his character gets from unnerving his opponent with various zings. So which NBA stars took to the silver screen—and which should stick to setting screens? The Professor from the And1 Mixtape Tour is in this movie. But Hustle will be particularly entertaining for die-hard NBA fans, due to its sheer immersion in the NBA world. In his new movie, Hustle, Sandler’s NBA costar is Jazz reserve Juancho Hernangómez, and the movie wraps with a scene at a Celtics-Sixers game that seems to be a season opener, or perhaps a preseason game.

Things could have gone either way for Hustle, the shot-in-Philly Adam Sandler basketball flick. Here are some Hustle reviews.

A look at Hustle reviews around the country show that a lot of people are enjoying this movie. AV Club: “Sports-themed movies are at their best when they focus on the human-interest story at their core. “It looks terrible.” That’s what a basketball-loving colleague told me after he saw the trailer for Hustle, the brand-new Adam Sandler basketball movie that was shot in Philadelphia. And, as I told Hustle director Jeremiah Zagar, a Philly native, I didn’t think I was going to like it either.

Adam Sandler and the Utah Jazz player Juancho Hernangómez lead an unsentimental sports drama in which success is tenuous and one mistake can derail a dream.

Anthony Edwards, the Minnesota Timberwolves’s 20-year-old rising star known as Ant-Man ( himself the No. 1 draft pick in 2020), excels in the riskiest role as a trash-talking villain who deserves to have a sweat sock shoved in his mouth. The glowering N.B.A. goofball Boban Marjanovic, of the Dallas Mavericks, gets in several good quips as an aspirant who shaves a decade off his age, and the player-turned-commentator Kenny Smith capably handles a sizable part as a high-powered agent. Cruz and Stanley’s mental and physical preparations for the draft are an uphill struggle in the literal sense, with Stanley shaking his prospect awake at 4 a.m. to run the streets of Philadelphia while shouting obscenities at him to thicken his skin. It casually clocks the rainbow of Lamborghinis outside an arena parking lot without going in for a belabored close-up. In real life, Hernangómez is a power forward for the Utah Jazz. Onscreen, he’s a breezy, quietly charismatic presence who allows Sandler to do the bellowing, then delivers a punchline right to the ribs. Fewer than 500 players are in the N.B.A. at any given time; gathered together, the players who have ascended to its ranks since it was founded in 1946 would not even come close to filling up Madison Square Garden. In the movie, Adam Sandler, a real-life devotee of the game, plays a weary scout for the Philadelphia 76ers named Stanley Sugerman who has spent his life sizing up potential rookies by their height, wingspan, speed and emotional fortitude.

The Netflix comedy-drama mines the star's obsession with the game, as well as his experiences in the entertainment industry.

The essentially documentary element of the fine points of basketball is the core charm of “Hustle,” extending also to the hard-nosed view of Stanley’s professional life and the web of connections that is fundamental to his ability to get things done. I need you to finish through the contact”; “It’s you against you out there, and right now you is kicking your ass”; “It’s about the next shot and the next shot and the next shot”; “A good player knows where he is on the court. Bo, though clearly a star in the making (Stanley says, “The kid is like if Scottie Pippen and a wolf had a baby”), doesn’t yet have the physical conditioning, the mental outlook, or the skill set of players who can turn pro—players who, at colleges in the U.S. or on international teams, have had the benefit of infrastructure and coaching. “Hustle” is in the genre of avocational cinema, in which the star combines his passion for basketball with his understanding that it’s also a business—and with his experience of the entertainment industry at large. That’s what he does in Judd Apatow’s “ Funny People,” in the role of a famous comedian, and in the Safdie brothers’ “ Uncut Gems,” in the role of a bling jeweller with a sports-gambling problem. Vince orders Stanley to cut ties with Bo, but Stanley is sure of the young man’s ability and character, and has already made a commitment to him and to his mother (María Botto). Stanley takes matters into his own hands: he quits to develop Bo’s talent independently in preparation for the N.B.A. draft.