Ron Shelton’s brash and energetic follow-up to Bull Durham drew arguably career-best performances out of Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson as two small-time hoop hustlers, who team up to clean up.
Shelton - who has since proved erratic within his chosen genre, the sports movie - displays his brilliant, idiosyncratic ear for dialogue (“Say my mother ain’t no astronaut!”) here, and an energetic direction at pains to keep the actors and their ball skills in the same frame. It’s overly long and the Rosie Perez sub-plot leads it astray, but mostly, it rocks.
