Jaycen Jennings, a former NFL superstar, agrees to coach a youth football team to avoid serving time in prison.
The Underdoggs is directed by Charles Stone III director of Drumline (2002), Lila & Eve (2015), Step Sisters (2017), Uncle Drew (2018) and a few others.
I'm a bit surprised, The Underdoggs isn't anywhere near as bad as I thought it was going to be. There is genuine heart put into this that does get lost throughout the movie due to issues I'll get into in a moment. The concept of the movie comes from The Snoop Youth Football League which was founded by Snoop Dogg it still continues to this day, C.J. Stroud who is the quarterback for the Houston Texans played in The Snoop Youth Football League which is really neat.
Snoop Dogg is quite great here, a lot of his jokes do end up being just saying "mother fucker" over and over again, but he gives a genuinely solid performance and there were moments that got a few laughs out of me. Mike Epps is also not too bad here he gives some decent laughs but unfortunately doesn't have a whole lot to work with as the movie goes on.
The main flaw here is while the movie does have heart, it's basically if you took any of those sports movies like Mighty Ducks and made the kids say piss and fuck over and over again, it's something we have seen so many times before only with extra cursing. Which is kind of the movie's only joke cursing a bunch of times and hope the viewer laughs. Which ultimately hurts the heartfelt moments and sort of puts into this weird mix of this sports movie that wants to have this heartfelt message and be good for kids but also wants to curse as much as possible.
I will admit some of the back and forth between the adults and kids were genuinely hilarious and is arguably where the movie shined the most, as I said before The Underdoggs is not as bad as I was expecting but that doesn't mean it's a good movie. It's very heavily flawed and repeats a lot of the same beats a lot of sports movies do (minus the swearing) but I do think this isn't the worst way to spend 96 minutes. There's some fun to be had here and I do think there is an audience for this one.
The Underdoggs is available on Amazon Prime Video.
4/10 D+
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