by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $13.99
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Caleb McLaughlin, Gabrielle Union, Aaron Pierre, David Harbour, Nick Kroll, Jennifer Hudson, Andrew Santino, Stephen Curry
Intro:
… for animals playing ball, it’s a better watch than most.
With the creatively bankrupt horrors of Space Jam: A New Legacy still fresh in the memories of those who survived it, the prospect of a new animated film about anthropomorphic animals playing basketball seems, at best, irksome.
Sure, it has the backing of Stephen Curry’s Unanimous Media (with the Chef making his debut as giraffe baller Lenny), but both Jordan and LeBron got their ankles broken trying to make these moves, so is he joining them or can he make the three-pointer?
Well, a three-pointer might be a Looney-looking reach, but he definitely puts some numbers on the board.
The animation from Sony Pictures Imageworks pulls some tricks out of the Spider-Verse playbook with the framerate, and the stylistic biomes and courts more than a little Zootopia, but for an attempt to turn the urban jungle into a literal one, it still looks damn good.
The combination of urban streets and buildings, with some well-used The Last of Us-esque overgrowth, makes for a solid environment to introduce the titular goat Will (Stranger Things’ Caleb McLaughlin), and the ‘roarball’ scenes, while a bit montage-heavy, capture a comparable energy and rush to anime The First Slam Dunk.
Seeing Will work around the mad disrespectful Mane Attraction (Aaron Pierre) in the Cage brings a certain And1 mixtape flavour to the picture, which is pretty cool to see in a mainstream production.
However, while the visuals and even the soundtrack show a solid grasp of the fundamentals, the script and story end up sticking just to the fundamentals of the genre and little else. While the two co-directors and three co-writers have sizeable experience in animation, working on shows like Bob’s Burgers and Fairfax, they’re rookies on a feature film, and that ends up showing. The tried-and-tested story beats for an underdog sports flick are hit like a metronome, the characters (while well-acted) are thin and tropey, and the further it goes, the more it seems to be speedrunning those same beats to the point where they lose cohesion and coherence.
It may have been a bit too obvious to make this into a full-on animalistic biopic a la Better Man for Curry, but the alternate path taken here is substantially less interesting.
But beyond the familiarity, there is an undisputed GOAT in attendance that absolutely shines at every turn. And weirdly enough, it’s not Will. Instead, it’s Gabrielle Union as the waning all-star Jett, who gets the real character arc here. Again, the beats that she’s been given are noticeably old-school, but she overclocks herself to give them all conviction, from pushing through physical injury, to a moment of bloodshot at-any-cost thirst for a win, to a genuinely beautiful sequence where she sees the impact of her legacy. She could have easily been the central character, and the film would be upgraded by multitudes, such is the sheer domination of her presence.
GOAT isn’t making any shots from half-court, but it’s still got some moves. There’s some blandness to how rotely it treats its sub-genre, and the power imbalance between the main character and his grizzled idol is glaring to the verge of distracting, but the sports action looks good, the voice cast are having fun with what they’re given (in that regard, it’s closer to the spirit of the OG Space Jam than its own sequel), and it makes for a nice melding of American basketball culture and post-Zootopia family entertainment that shows good understanding of what makes them both interesting. It may not be the full Stephen Furry experience, but for animals playing ball, it’s a better watch than most.
