'Hustle' drafts Adam Sandler for an NBA movie with a solid inside game
CNN
"Hustle" doesn't score any points for originality. Yet Adam Sandler's latest Netflix film -- produced with, among others, LeBron James -- mostly works in following a familiar playbook, peppering its NBA-level action with several basketball cameos.
Although the movie has no shortage of close kin (including Netflix's "Boogie" from last year), one of its sillier ancestors would be "The Air Up There," a 1994 movie that had Kevin Bacon locating the basketball big man of his dreams in Africa.
Here, Sandler's Stanley Sugerman is a well-traveled scout for the Philadelphia 76ers, who stumbles on a streetball hustler in Spain, Bo Cruz (NBA player Juancho Hernangómez), whose lockdown defensive skills prompt Stanley to describe the guy more than once as being "like Scottie Pippen and a wolf had a baby."
