MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Blue Chips’ Doesn’t Score but It’s a Good Sport

Sports movies don’t always have to be great to be fun. The ritualistic confrontations, the banter, the joy of physical release can keep you watching even when the characters are stock and the plot predictable.

“Blue Chips” stars Nick Nolte as Pete Bell, the basketball coach of Western U., on the verge of his first losing season after winning two championships and eight conference titles. The film is about how the valiant, by-the-book Pete, in an effort to recruit three blue-chip high school phenoms to save his job, crosses the line into corruption.

At its best, though, “Blue Chips” is really about the wiggy, muscle-twitch world of high-pressure college athletics. The movie is best around the edges, when it’s jamming and anecdotal and not taking itself so heroically seriously. Corruption in college athletics is not quite the eye-opener this movie makes it out to be; it may be a measure of our cynicism that we can’t take a story like this straight anymore. Outrage is certainly called for but too often “Blue Chips” assumes we were born, if not yesterday, the day before.

It helps that Nolte is such a heroic presence that his waverings and capitulations seem immensely poignant. He doesn’t go in for a lot of heavy-browed agonizing; without making a big deal of it he shows us how small Pete feels when he looks the other way. Pete’s love of the game is bound up with his love of winning. By the end of the film he learns to recognize that the two cannot always co-exist.

Co-existence is also a problem with the shaggy, catch-all wit of screenwriter Ron Shelton and the head-pounding style of director William (“The French Connection”) Friedkin. “Blue Chips” is set up to be looser and funnier than it turns out to be.

Shelton, who wrote and directed “Bull Durham” and “White Men Can’t Jump,” the two best sports-themed films of the past 10 years, understands how athletic release can loosen you up all over. Sports becomes a way of jazzing your life, of giving it a rhythm you can carry in your head like a tune.

The congregation of characters in Shelton’s movies are spangled, combative, intuitive, with a line of rap that’s an extension of their sports playing. Though some of the characters and situations in “Blue Chips” are, for Shelton, sub-par--he wrote the script 12 years ago--the film might still have taken off had he directed it. His best ideas--like the rival scouts who dog Pete’s trail and who resemble a Preston Sturges troupe--require a more glancing touch.

And so do the basketball sequences. Friedkin shows us amazing ball handlers like Shaquille O’Neill, Anfernee “Penny” Hardaway and Matt Nover (as the three recruits) and then films their skirmishes in a crunch-and-thud style more appropriate to professional wrestling or stock car racing. What’s missing is the poetry of the sport--the poetry that must have attracted not only Pete to the game but the players too. If we had seen more of the beauty of basketball, the corruptions of the three phenoms would have carried a more ambiguous force. (Their sellouts might have seemed tragic, like Pete’s.)

The subplot involving Pete and his former wife (Mary McDonnell) is a bit too undeveloped and touchy-feely, and the only thing missing from the scenes with J.T. Walsh as a wicked alumni organization head are rattlesnakes on the soundtrack. A few sequences, including the ones at the very end, seem truncated, and superb actors like Robert Wuhl and Lou Gossett pop up for teensy cameos. (Apparently G.D. Spradlin didn’t make the cut at all, though he’s featured in the TV ads for the film.)

There are still fine moments, like the way Alfre Woodard, as the mother of one of the blue chips, cuts to the quick in her conversation with Pete. (She wants a new home and an expensive office.) Boston Celtic legend Bob Cousy, as Western U.’s athletic director, has a wonderful, bemused openness; he has a terrific scene where he converses with Pete while sinking a seemingly endless succession of baskets. (Indiana coach Bobby Knight shows up as himself, and so does Larry Bird. Let’s just say he’s a better ball handler than word handler.)

Shaquille O’Neal doesn’t really try to act but he’s so upfront about what he’s doing that his amateurishness is kind of endearing. And he can stand next to Nolte and make him seem puny--no small feat. (The combo is a great visual joke.)

“Blue Chips” should be better than it is--a movie about standing up to corruption shouldn’t be this eager to go for the commercial jugular. But in flashes it makes you realize why you like sports--and sports movies--in the first place.

‘Blue Chips’

Nick Nolte: Pete Bell Mary McDonnell: Jenny J.T. Walsh: Happy Shaquille O’Neal: Neon

A Paramount release of a Michele Rappaport production. Director William Friedkin. Producer Michele Rappaport. Executive producers Ron Shelton, Wolfgang Glattes. Screenplay by Shelton. Cinematographer Tom Priestley Jr. Editor Robert K. Lambert, David Rosenbloom. Costumes Bernie Pollack. Music Nile Rodgers. Production design James Bissell. Art director Ed Verraux. Set designer John H. M. Berger, Lauren Polizzi. Set decorator Thomas L. Roysden. Sound Kirk Francis. Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes.

MPAA rating: PG-13, for language. Times guidelines: It includes frequent obscenities.