Uncle Drew (2018)
TOMATOMETER
AUDIENCE SCORE
Critic Consensus: Kyrie Irving's crossover to comedy is amiable enough to score with basketball fans, but Uncle Drew is held back by formulaic plotting and too much product placement.
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Cast
as Uncle Drew
as Dax
as Big Fella
as Lights
as Boots
as Preacher
as Maya
as Betty Lou
as Mookie
as Jess
as Angelo
as Louis
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Critic Reviews for Uncle Drew
All Critics (77) | Top Critics (23) | Fresh (50) | Rotten (27)
The story-which is based on a Pepsi commercial-hits facile beats of reconciliation, redemption, and romance, but the men's hearty jibes and the glimpses of their latter-day lives evoke depths of emotion and experience that remain untapped.
The jokes could be dirtier, the plot looser, the basketball action more gleefully ludicrous. Instead, everything feels very competent but safe.
It's a totally formulaic sports movie, but it's got a lot of liveliness to it and watching these guys play off of each other is fun.
Leave Jurassic World to the kiddies and spend a few hours in the dark with these irresistible dinosaurs.
Uncle Drew mistakes its goofy pitch for a free pass to be simple with its comedy, and sappy with its emotions.
Lil Rel Howery, Tiffany Haddish, JB Smoove and Nick Kroll are terrific, as we'd expect. It's more of a surprise that basketballers Irving, Miller, Robinson, Leslie, et al., are also quite good.
Audience Reviews for Uncle Drew
Is this film for everyone? No, probably not. But I think there's at least something everyone can enjoy. It's a sports movie with a little bit of romance, comedy, and plenty of heart. So even if you're not out at your local park pretending to be Jordan or LeBron, there's plenty to be enjoyed here. I found it to be a lot like Tag from a few weeks prior. I didn't necessarily laugh out loud more than a few times (dissimilar to what my audience did at the theater), but I found myself connected to these ridiculous characters and smiling along with this wild ride. Reggie Miller and Chris Webber were surprisingly tolerable as actors, and actually pretty funny at times. Kyrie Irving did his best to co-lead a film in which he's in makeup that's "supposed to" age him 60+ years. And of course there's Shaq, who certainly improves upon the last movie I remember him leading, Kazaam. But the film only works if you buy into Lil Rey Howery as Dax, a down on his luck basketball coach who just wants to win the Rucker Park tournament one year. I could do without the Tiffany Haddish storyline, which felt like something out of a lame sitcom, but I bought into his failed basketball career and his aspirations to coach a champion. Sure, you know exactly where the film is going, but if the film succeeds in telling the story it wants to tell, it doesn't necessarily matter the route it took to get there. 6.9/10
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