Review: The Underdoggs

Have you ever seen a movie about a washed-up, egotistical guy who gets in trouble with the law and ends up coaching a team of loser kiddie athletes, and eventually becomes a decent human being again? If you have, you’ve already seen The Underdoggs, the latest film that was originally scheduled for a theatrical release, but is now sliding straight into Amazon Prime Video.

As you’ve probably guessed from the title, Snoop Dogg is involved with this. Not only does he produce (and provide the end-credits theme song), he plays the POS protagonist. We’re to believe the famously lanky rap legend is Jaycen “2J’s” Jennings, a has-been wide receiver whose arrogance and short fuse (in the flashback opening sequence, he smacks a kid for heckling him) has made him unhirable. He spends his days recording a podcast from wherever —his bedroom, his front lawn, his gold-plated, Mercedes-Benz SUV.

After getting plowed by a bus in a very CGIed car accident, a judge orders him to do community service in Long Beach, his old stomping grounds. (If you don’t understand how a guy who was T-boned by a bus would be sentenced to community service, trust me, you’re not the only one.)

Heading back home to pick up garbage gets him reacquainted with some old chums, like gangbanging knucklehead Kareem (Mike Epps), who first reunites with Jennings while dude was trying to jack Jennings’s car, and Cherise (Tika Sumpter), Jennings’s old high-school girlfriend. Cherise’s son (Jonigan Booth) is part of a pitiful, pee-wee football team that includes a die-hard Game of Thrones fan (Alexander Michael Gordon), a kid (Adan James Carrillo) whose parents think he’s hanging with mathletes, and a mysterious bruiser (Kylah Davila) whose face is concealed with a helmet and a visor. Oh yeah, and they all curse like muhfuckin’ sailors.

Yes, it’s a filthy, foul-mouthed free-for-all, with Snoop and all these little bastards getting their Bad News Bears on and finding vast, various ways to curse out everybody and anybody they come in contact with. There is even an opening disclaimer for those parents who get easily offended seeing little kids frequently, feverishly say the F-word.

While you get the feeling that most of the cast ad-libbed their way through scenes (especially Epps, who constantly acts like he just got through running from the cops), Underdoggs sticks to the playbook narrative-wise, predictably going all the ways a sports movie like this usually goes. For a brief minute, I thought Snoop and Paid in Full director Charles Stone III (who directed one of my favorite sports movies, the Bernie Mac vehicle Mr. 3000) were goofing on silly, sappy sports movies like this. Kareem occasionally brings up how this whole thing is just like The Mighty Ducks, right down to Jennings trying to get with his star player’s momma. There’s also a scene where Jennings has a heart-to-heart with his old high-school coach (George Lopez) and immediately thinks his mentor is a “Jedi mind-tricking muhfucka” for making him see the light.

Unfortunately, Isaac Schamis and Danny Segal didn’t so much write a script as take all the familiar beats and tropes from other movies of this ilk and add a bunch of F-bombs. (If you think Jennings won’t face that third-act dilemma of doing something major for his career or doing something major for the kids, your ass is surely mistaken.) I can’t help but think producer/sitcom mogul Kenya Barris aided in dumbing the script down and amping up the vulgarity. (Both Schamis and Segal have written for the Barris sitcoms Grown-ish and #BlackAF.)

The Underdoggs is basically an R-rated commercial for the rapper’s famed Snoop Youth Football League, his own Pop Warner outfit. (It’s also brought to by Raising Cane’s, the chicken-tender haven that is a favorite of Snoop’s and whose logo is on all the Underdoggs’ jerseys.) I would’ve much preferred to see a documentary about Snoop’s love of football, and how his league is molding and shaping future Hall of Famers like Texans quarterback C.J. Stroud.

Instead, we got The Underdoggs, 90-or-so minutes of little kids and a gangsta-rap god being the most shit-talking pricks they can possibly be.