On this one, I feel like Barney Stinson from "How I Met Your Mother," where a running gag was that Barney considered the baddies in movies to be the good guys--basically the premise for the "Cobra Kai" reworking of "The Karate Kid" series. So, in "Blue Chips," we have a booster named "Happy" played menacingly by perennial-villain J. T. Walsh who encourages Nick Nolte's impersonation of an artless coach Bob Knight type to pay the college basketball team's "blue chip" recruits under the table. Nolte's coach Pete Bell even scoffs at Happy's argument that the players deserve compensation for making them rich, and he inevitably has a crisis of conscience--because heaven forbid a few of the best players be paid a pittance for the billions-of-dollars business they perform in and including making college-sports coaches, such as the fictional one here who throws tantrums in the locker room--screaming in their faces and throwing stuff--the highest paid state employees in parts of the United States. If there's a hero in "Blue Chips," it's not coach Bell; it's Happy.
The NCAA is a racket, and "Blue Chips" is at its best when it seems to explore that corruption, but when it goes all Pollyanna about the supposed purity of a game and weepy over breaking the rules where unpaid young adults entertain and are distracted from doing any actual studying for huge, crowded stadiums--bigger than the high-school one they used for filming here--and for TV and in between commercials to make coaches, executives and, perhaps, even gamblers millionaires, it's nauseating. Recently, the real NCAA has been forced to allow student athletes some compensation, so at least now they may be underpaid above board. Happy vindicated, I suppose.
As for the basketball, my favorite sport by the way, it certainly benefits from featuring actual basketball players, including NBA stars Shaquille O'Neal and Anfernee Hardaway, the latter of whom is said to have been traded for by O'Neal's Orlando Magic based on their relationship working on this film. But, the hoop scenes here do suffer from the appearance of seemingly just being recordings of them playing impromptu scrimmage games in high-school gymnasiums to later be edited into a semblance of stories of supposed games. The rest of the film, however, doesn't benefit at all from, in particular, O'Neal's mugging. This isn't "Inside the NBA" on TNT; someone edit out this cutesy giant schtick for the cutting-room floor. And what's the point of epilogue text for what happened to the coach and players when it's a fictional story? It just looks hackneyed and stupid, as does much of the rest of "Blue Chips."
The NCAA is a racket, and "Blue Chips" is at its best when it seems to explore that corruption, but when it goes all Pollyanna about the supposed purity of a game and weepy over breaking the rules where unpaid young adults entertain and are distracted from doing any actual studying for huge, crowded stadiums--bigger than the high-school one they used for filming here--and for TV and in between commercials to make coaches, executives and, perhaps, even gamblers millionaires, it's nauseating. Recently, the real NCAA has been forced to allow student athletes some compensation, so at least now they may be underpaid above board. Happy vindicated, I suppose.
As for the basketball, my favorite sport by the way, it certainly benefits from featuring actual basketball players, including NBA stars Shaquille O'Neal and Anfernee Hardaway, the latter of whom is said to have been traded for by O'Neal's Orlando Magic based on their relationship working on this film. But, the hoop scenes here do suffer from the appearance of seemingly just being recordings of them playing impromptu scrimmage games in high-school gymnasiums to later be edited into a semblance of stories of supposed games. The rest of the film, however, doesn't benefit at all from, in particular, O'Neal's mugging. This isn't "Inside the NBA" on TNT; someone edit out this cutesy giant schtick for the cutting-room floor. And what's the point of epilogue text for what happened to the coach and players when it's a fictional story? It just looks hackneyed and stupid, as does much of the rest of "Blue Chips."