Review of “The Longshots”

The idea that Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst would direct a family film like “The Longshots” is the stuff of late-night talk show jokes, an idea so absurd that there would seem to be some law of nature prohibiting it. But you’ve got to hand it to Durst. The guy skyrockets to fame and coolness, plummets twice as hard, and manages to earn himself a job as a film director. “The Longshots” is his second film, following up on “The Education of Charlie Banks” last year, and Durst and screenwriter Nick Santora should be lauded for their ability to make it slightly less mundane than most family comedies. The real life-based story follows Jasmine Plummer (Keke Palmer) from humiliated nerd at school to the first female quarterback of a Pop Warner football team in history. Her athleticism is nurtured by her uncle Curtis Plummer (Ice Cube), a washed out former football player (in college or high school? The movie never really tells us) who became unemployed after the manufacturing sector upped and left their town of Minden, Illinois. They’re seldom shown apart as the film moves from symphony-backed sentimentality to football-in-the-crotch gag. For as one-dimensional as a family film directed by Fred Durst and starring Ice Cube inevitably will be, though, the film at least includes some subtle socioeconomic commentary about how the departure of blue-collar jobs has impoverished small American towns, and – surprisingly – there aren’t any moments so horribly executed as to be considered intolerable. But “tolerable” is the strongest endorsement the movie gets.