Embarrassingly written and equally badly directed by Preston A. Whitmore II, CROSSOVER is a streetball sandwich that opens and closes with a big streetball game but everything in between is melodrama of the worst variety with a little streetball hustling sprinkled in. It almost looks like a completely different person direct the streetball games, which are overly stylized to the point of overkill. Bullet time has apparently become so passé that even a director that resorts to every conceivable speed up, slow down, freeze frame, quick cut, etc. editing trick imaginable didn't bother with it. And damn near every last one of these editing tricks is accompanied by the sort of sound effect you'd expect to see on a 24-hour news channel when some special graphics explode onto the screen. It's still just a bunch of guys running back and forth, fancily passing a ball, and shooting hoops. No amount of editing tricks, razzle dazzle ball playing, cheering crowds, or coochie-popping cheerleaders helps it generate an ounce of excitement or suspense. This isn't streetball; it's deadball. Even YOU GOT SERVED had some energetic dance numbers going for it.

The other 90% of CROSSOVER looks and feels like the sort of amateurish, no budget, shot-on-digital, clichéd, urban clunker that York Entertainment releases to DVD on a regular basis. Shoddy production values, dreadfully bland, and amateurishly acted with howlingly bad dialog; things are made even worse by a script that constantly loses focus as characters' moods change mid-scene and plot points get introduced then ignored or forgotten about only to be reintroduced later on as if viewers are expected to remember or care. And yet somehow CROSSOVER got an actual theatrical release. The mind boggles. CROSSOVER looks like the work of a first-time filmmaker that doesn't yet have a full grasp on how to stage a shot or create a narrative, but Whitmore isn't a novice. The man has been making movies for over a decade (such as the 1995 theatrically released Vietnam melodrama THE WALKING DEAD) so he has no excuses.

Whitmore the director also loves falling back on stock footage montages for establishing the location of certain scenes. These are easy to spot because this stock footage was clearly shot on a completely different (and inferior) film stock. A trip to California brings us a stock footage montage of Sony studios and every other recognizable tourist attraction Whitmore could get a piece of video of. A shot of the outside of the mall the leads work at is used at least a half dozen times. One particular montage of the inner city stock footage looked so old and grainy I honestly began wondering if the opening credits to Good Times or What's Happening? were about to roll.

CROSSOVER revolves around lifelong friends Tech and Noah, a pair of dullards in both the boring and idiotic senses of the word. There's an awful lot of talk in the movie about getting an education and lord knows these two need it. Ex-con Tech works at the mall shoe store and makes extra money moonlighting as a streetballer, all the while studying to get his GED. Noah also works at the shoe store, drives a fancy motorbike, and has received a full basketball scholarship to UCLA. He also plays for Tech's streetball team (Team Name: Enemy of the State - seriously!), although he doesn't take a cut of the money they make because if anyone at UCLA found out he could lose his scholarship.

Tech has somehow managed to land a role in a TV commercial but only if he can fly himself out to Los Angeles. Thank goodness Noah got an extra plane ticket to take one person with him to his UCLA orientation. Too bad Noah meets a beauty salon hoochie mamma named Vanessa at a tattoo party - never a good start to a relationship - and, after only knowing each other for a few short hours, offers to take her along with him to California. You'd think Tech would be pissed at his friend for doing this. Not really. Tech fully understands. He then raises the money for his own plane ticket hustling neighborhood streetballers using a scam straight out of WHITE MEN CAN'T JUMP. Heck, Tech even manages to raise enough cash to take his new nail technician girlfriend, the platinum-haired Eboni, along with him on the trip to LA.

It's kind of hard for a movie to generate any sort of tension between characters when every single time a plot complication is introduced, whether it be something as simple as petty jealousy or as complicated as a deep dark secret about Tech taking the fall for a crime Noah committed, it's blown off moments later with little or no consequences. The dialog alone will make your brain hurt and every scene plays more like the audition tapes for the movie than something that should have made it into the final cut. It doesn't help that the script sounds like it was written first and then Whitmore consulted a dictionary of popular urban slang which he used to rewrite the lines to the point of it all sounding unnaturally forced even by hip-hop standards. My favorite moment of excess ebonics occurs early on when Tech refers to Noah as "dog" roughly 10,000 times through the course of a three-minute scene.

Just how abysmal is the screenplay? Everyone get a pen and paper and write the following sentence: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. Congratulations, you've just written a better story than that of CROSSOVER.

This leads us to the conniving Vaughn, an ex-sports agent from Los Angeles that got tired of being a nobody out there so he returned to Detroit where he's now a somebody running a posh nightclub and organizing the local underground streetball league where players compete for money and gamblers compete for even bigger money. Though the streetball league has made him a local big shot, he still answers to some never seen higher ups. Vaughn is repeatedly pulled over by the same white police officer who either gives him a wad of cash or a scolding for something not going the way they like it. Evil whitey pigs sullying the good name of underground streetball gambling with their clandestine micromanagement - damn the man!

But where Vaughn really sees dollar signs is in Noah. He thinks Noah is good enough to forsake college and tryout for the NBA. Of course, Vaughn will be his agent and make a huge percentage. Knowing there's no guarantee that he'll make it, and if he tries and fails he’ll lose his scholarship, Noah never thinks twice about rejecting the temptation of crossing over to the NBA. He wants only to keep a promise he made his late mother that he go to college and become a doctor.

Did I mention that the smarmy Vaughn is played by Wayne Brady? Yes, Wayne Brady… As the villain... Song and dance man comedian Wayne Brady... As the villain.... This is like casting Ben Vereen as a movie’s villain. Now while it’s not quite on the level of say miscasting Jimmie Walker as Nino Brown in NEW JACK CITY, there are still some people who just cannot be taken seriously as a film's menace. Wayne Brady is one of those people. This isn't supposed to be a comedy, and it isn't his self-parody from Chappelle's Show either. And, no, growing a goatee doesn't make him anymore threatening. It also doesn't help that the script never really calls for him to be nearly the full blown devil in the flesh it seems to think it has painted him as.



There’s a mind blowing scene where Noah and Vanessa go out to dinner at a fancy bistro. Keep in mind they've only been dating for a few weeks, although it seems more like a couple days. She nonchalantly tells him that she's pregnant. Noah - the calmest 18-year old in the face of unexpected fatherhood in the history of mankind - immediately reacts to this news as if they'd been together for years and had been trying to conceive a child. No sooner does he ask her to marry him (He even already had a ring handy!) then Wayne Brady shows up and has a seat at their table to begin trying to tempt him. I don't what sort of emotion the actress playing Vanessa was trying to convey while Vaughn and Noah bickered over his prospecting for the NBA but she had the doe-eyed gleam of a baby in a high chair being presented with his or her first birthday cake. The role of Vanessa went to a young woman that won on America's Next Top Model a few years back. It certainly wasn't America's Next Top Actress.

That dinner scene was second most unintentionally hilarious moment in a movie that really could have used more unintended comedy. The real moment of zen comes when a furious Tech finds out that he's just the basketball playing double for a better looking actor who is going to be the real star of that commercial. Tech's tirade culminates in him decking a guy with what may very well be the single worst looking punch thrown in a big screen Hollywood movie in the last 26 years. I swear if CROSSOVER were ever featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000 that punch would no doubt been the clip replayed following the episode's end credits.

Future Montell Williams Show guest Vanessa secretly sabotages Noah's basketball scholarship believing doing so will convince him to try going pro. After Noah tells her that he's still more interested in getting an education at the local community college, she reveals that the baby isn't his, cruelly dresses him down, and dumps him. A distraught Noah gets into a basketball career ending motorcycle crash. Tech blames Vaughn. As Tech puts it, Vaughn knew where Vanessa was from and what kind of woman she was and what would happen once he planted the seeds in her mind about Noah becoming a big NBA star. Tech goes so far as to describe Vanessa as being a woman that was "born with larceny in her heart." You have to wonder if Tech really knew all along what a no good skeezer Vanessa was then why the hell didn't he ever step in and try to protect his "dog" Noah from her in the first place.

There's only one way to settle the score with Vaughn: a high stakes streetball game with Jewelz’ undefeated team. Who is Jewelz? He’s the top baller in Detroit, Vaughn's chosen one, and Tech’s arch nemesis on the court. Not only must Tech's team win this game in order to get the money needed for Noah’s expensive medical bills, the bet requires Enemy of the State to keep Jewelz' team from even scoring 11 points as opposed to the typical streetball game where the first team to reach 21 points win. Baskets are worth a point each until you reach 19 and then the last shot is worth two. Why am I bothering to explain the rules to streetball when even the movie barely cares about the game? This is not a sports movie. In fact, it makes the insipid WB Network dramatics of SUPERCROSS: THE MOVIE look Oscar caliber by comparison.

Judging by his emotionless facial expression, steely-eyed stare, and perfect game play during the big game, Tech seemingly transformed himself into some sort of basketball playing cyborg - the Ballinator, if you will. And what a triumphant moment it is when Tech finally schools that punk Jewelz for that smug attitude he displayed in all 90-seconds of his prior on-screen time. And, boy, does Tech ever put that slimeball Vaughn in his place at the end when the wretch attempts to make him an unsavory business deal, only to be shot down by some anti-bling, pro-education speechifying. The prolonged final shot of Tech walking into the sunset desperately needed that "The More You Know" graphic to come flying across the screen.

Right as the closing credits began to roll I heard an audible groan emanate from someone in the back of the practically empty theater. This didn't sound like an exaggerated groan done for comical effect or the groan of someone having difficulty standing up. This was a groan of relief that comes when some protracted form of mental duress has finally come to a merciful end. In all my years of attending movies, including some of the worst Hollywood has to offer, I have never actually heard anyone let out such a groan until CROSSOVER. That's the kind of movie this is. You've heard of a film being a crowd pleaser? CROSSOVER is a crowd punisher.

Now while I wouldn't label CROSSOVER as being a "you've got to see this movie just to believe how bad it is" sort of movie, it's still stupendously awful on every conceivable level. It's just bad filmmaking, period.