White Men Can't Jump

White Men Can't Jump starts out just right... near dawn on the beach at Venice, California, three black street singers are harmonizing on a song backed by a guitar and drums, just enjoying the sound of their voices together. Bill Hoyle (Harrelson), a white kid with a basketball, walks by; he asks directions to the court. Later in the day a game is in progress by the court's regular players, the best of whom is Sidney Deane (Snipes). As much as the game, the players enjoy the constant verbal dueling that accompanies it, bragging, toasting, rapping, dissing and joking. The physical activity matched to the machine gun verbal style matched to…, perhaps, the rhythms of life itself, of the mundane day by day, of drive and ambition, of love and relationships. Harrelson hustles Snipes, acting like a dumb white dope and beating him out of $64 at shooting baskets. They team up, to hustle others: Harrelson egged on by his girlfriend (Perez) who wants to get on Jeopardy so she studies trivia and drinks vodka all day, Snipes by his wife who stays home with their child as he hustles basketball because he can't find construction jobs. The film is filled with funny bits, brilliant runs of almost exhilarating dialogue and superbly and lustfully detailed romantic relationships (Shelton's specialty), but it never hits a narrative rhythm. The opening remains the best part, the most stimulating and coherent. The rest of the film wanders around a series of personal interactions, romantic encounters (some of which display Shelton's uncanny ability to capture the meandering verbal and physical play of intimate relationships) and basketball games, all cut and paced exactly the same way. Rather than escalating, any dramatic tension fizzles, sputtering to a strange and unsatisfying conclusion. Harrelson never really seems to find his character, an emotionally explosive hustler, which makes it especially difficult to catch the shifts in the verbal play from boasting to threatening, from fun to serious. It's easy to like this film, it spews energy and delights in all its characters and their lives. Shelton's enthusiasm is remarkably refreshing, but it's not enough to mean well, and we don't know much more about these people or their world at the end than we learn at the beginning.