White Men Can’t Jump review: this remake barely hits the rim

On the heels of his interracial romantic comedy You People, which arrived earlier this year on Netflix, comes Kenya Barris’ remake of the 1992 interracial buddy comedy White Men Can’t Jump, which arrives May 19 on Hulu. Race is often on Barris’ mind, as anyone knows who’s seen his television programs, from Black-ish to Black Lightning to #BlackAF. His frank and straightforward way of speaking to issues of race has been refreshing and occasionally enlightening. The blunt talk in You People makes you squirm as you giggle; the movie’s comedic currency is people saying the quiet part out loud, perhaps hearing themselves for the first time. The new WMCJ, though, is never particularly enlightening and is less funny. It depends more on crass humor and obvious ideas rather than the shared insights of people from different backgrounds.

Both You People, which Barris co-wrote and directed, and the White Men Can’t Jump remake, which Barris co-wrote and produced, are very much about race and relationships; by comparison, the original WMCJ (written and directed by Ron Shelton) knew little about relationships and is only tangentially about race—despite its title. Nevertheless, the remake of WMCJ, also set in the Black communities of greater Los Angeles, fancies itself as having more on its mind than the original flick, but the ball rarely makes it through the hoop.

The new film, directed by Calmatic, provides a prologue to frame the motivations of our principal characters (the original did not), then works its way around to Kamal (Sinqua Walls from Friday Night Lights in the Wesley Snipes role) and Jeremy (Jack Harlow, a rapper turned not very good actor, in the Woody Harrelson role) street ballers who hustle players for money based on the notion that Jeremy can’t possibly play well because he’s white. While this notion may have been comedically plausible in 1992—after all, a white man did not win an NBA slam dunk contest until 1996—in 2023, it reads a bit racist, and I’m saying this as a critic who is also Black. And none of the conceits the filmmakers insinuate into the story—including mentioning that the idea conveyed in the movie’s title is, in fact, racist—makes it any less so. So they press on and make a film that explores ideas around anger management, grief, fear of failure, and race based on the premise that white men can’t jump.

In the prologue, we meet Kamal as a young high school baller on the cusp of making it big. His father (played by the late Lance Reddick) is one of those basketball dads, living out his failed dreams through his son. A decade later, Kamal is a delivery driver with a wife and a kid playing street ball for extra money. As in the original, he gets hustled by Jeremy because he assumes that the “white boy” can’t possibly outshoot him—in his own gym, no less. Jeremy is a former college star who blew out his knee but still has dreams of playing professionally. Soon, there will be big-money tournaments, our heroes overcoming their issues … blah, blah, blah.