- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
The movie is a volatile combination of ambitious mythmaking and nasty reality, and like most of Spike Lee’s work, it is also an inextricable combination of good and bad.
-
88Lee uses visual imagination to lift his material into the realms of hopes and dreams.
-
83As is often the case with Lee, though, the film left me wishing for even more scenes of casual intimacy, still the most powerful way to carry any message.
-
80Basketball, bold urban landscapes, larger-than-life characters and red-hot visual pyrotechnics are the strong points of Mr. Lee's biggest three-ring circus, not to mention the central presence of Denzel Washington.
-
80As usual, Lee tries many kinds of stylistic effects and uses wall-to-wall music (by Aaron Copland and Public Enemy); what’s different this time is how personally driven the story feels.
-
75Its best moments are as exuberant and insightful as anything the screen has given us this season, and its passionate concern for believable characters in a recognizably real world offers a refreshing change from the current spate of feel-good fantasies.
-
75He Got Game seems to cheer for integrity, honesty and hard work while playing up its own cheap thrills.
-
75This is essentially a familiar story told with consummate skill.
-
70Awkward and often downright silly, He Got Game is nonetheless heartfelt, a moving portrayal of a man who finds his long-lost son through faith, hope and basketball.
-
70Flaws and all, this may be Spike's most purely enjoyable movie, and his best looking
-
70Uneven, ludicrous, but--oh man!--fun to watch.
-
67For all his superfan's intimacy with b-ball culture, he focuses less on the sport's fascinating mystique than on generic recapitulation of how celebrity culture seduces and devours young minority athletes.
-
60Lacking the moral indignation, outrage and militant politics that marked Lee's earlier work, this vibrantly colorful film is a tad too soft at the center, and arguably the director's most mainstream movie.
-
60He got too much movie. That's the scoring total on Spike Lee's He Got Game, which ultimately must be judged a mild disappointment.
-
The film is gorgeously shot (slow-motion basketballs spin in the air like Kubrick's spaceships), and the majestic Aaron Copland score helps some of the images to soar, but Lee's screenplay, heavy-handed and didactic, gives the actors little room to convey any real emotions.
-
50Coming from a major director like Spike Lee, this is a colossal disappointment. And a surprising one.
-
50Though too long by a good half hour, Lee's latest film packs a genuine emotional punch, largely because its polemical agenda doesn't entirely eclipse the drama.
-
50Lee makes a great looking film, though the soap box message about greed becomes exhausted and overplayed early on.
-
50The problem, sadly, is that the whole amounts to less than the sum of its parts.
-
20There's not a relationship in He Got Game that feels right, especially the one between Washington and Allen, and if that doesn't work, neither does the film.
prev
next
Page:
- 1
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 3 out of 3
-
Mixed: 0 out of 3
-
Negative: 0 out of 3
-
SeanK9
-
JoshC.9