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Crossover

I like Wayne Brady and all, but no one puts the name Wayne Brady in the same sentence with “$100 Million box office blockbuster,” and after Crossover, you never will. 

Wesley Jonathan and Anthony Mackie play Noah Cruise and Tech - two talented Detroit kids with amazing basketball skills, whose lives are going in different directions.  Noah has a scholarship to UCLA, which he wants to parlay into a trip to medical school, while Tech is studying for his GED and he’s so poor he lives in Detroit’s 7 Mile instead of 8 Mile (he’s so poor, he doesn’t even get a last name, he’s just Tech!).  A slimy street agent and gambling godfather, Vaughn (Wayne “Playing the Wayne Brady he was on Chappelle’s Show” Brady), wants to get his hooks into Noah to force him to go pro, and make a few bucks for himself along the way. 

When Noah and Tech each find serious girlfriends, and their worlds start to move farther and farther apart, will they be able to withstand the pressure and make the right choices in life?  Can they support each other through these troubled times?

Crossover might have its heart in the right place, but its brain is somewhere else all together.  Everything about the movie is dreadful including the acting, directing, story, and dialogue.  Writer/director Preston Whitmore, II constantly plays around with idiotic camera tricks and edits to make the dull movie more interesting, but makes you feel like you have stepped off a roller coaster after eating 10 hot dogs instead.  It’s another case of style over substance and using techniques that do not enhance the story in any measurable way possible.  His script is full of posing and chest thumping moments where characters talk about how it’s “my house” or they preen to the extreme in ways even Terrell Owens would be embarrassed, and each line of dialogue gets a little more idiotic by the minute.   

Then, the story never seems to find its stride and start building to a climax.  Instead, Whitmore tries to throw in every movie cliché and the kitchen sink to add some emotion and heartstring tugging moments that fall flat because every acting performance is stiff, unemotional and, many, are amateurish.  Wesley Jonathan (Nick Cannon’s doppelganger) has shown himself to be better in other movies and TV projects, so I’ll cut him some slack, but Mackie, supposedly a graduate of Julliard, seems to be taking a page out of the rap video acting book choosing to pose instead of emote.  As far as Brady, I hope they bring back Who’s Line Is It Anyway.  He was very good on that show.

Crossover is a failure of epic proportions summed up in one accidental moment when you can see an onlooker standing on his front porch watching the filming of the scene, but he loses interest and heads back inside, just like you wish you could.  

0 Waffle (Out Of 4)

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