Rapper Lil' Bow Wow is natural in 'Like Mike'

By Marshall Fine
The (Westchester, N.Y.) Journal News

LIKE MIKE (Rated PG for mild profanity) Two Stars (Fair) A 14-year-old finds a pair of magic shoes with "MJ" written inside and begins to play well enough to join the NBA. A sports fantasy comedy that's strictly for kids. Starring Lil' Bow Wow, Morris Chestnut, Jonathan Lipnicki. Directed by John Schultz. Twentieth Century-Fox. Rated PG (mild profanity). 87 minutes.

In the case of "Like Mike," of course it is. In the time-honored tradition of movies involving adolescents and professional sports, a pair of magic sneakers turns a middle-schooler into an NBA superstar overnight, in the kind of kids' comedy-fantasy that Disney used to churn out by the yard in the 1960s.

This being the 21st century, the hero of "Like Mike" is played by a pint-sized rapper named Lil' Bow Wow, who portrays orphan Calvin Cambridge. Calvin lives in an L.A. group home run by the creepy Crispin Glover, who apparently holds weekly open houses to shop the orphans in his care. But Calvin and his friends have little hope of being adopted because they're too old: "We're like dogs," observes one youngster. "Parents only want puppies."

But Calvin proclaims that "all orphans are special and have special destinies." He finds his when a box of used clothing, brought to the home for the orphans, yields a pair of pre-owned sneakers that fit Calvin perfectly — and have the initials MJ scrawled on the underside of the tongue.

The house bully, however, steals Calvin's new shoes and tosses them onto a nearby phone line. Calvin is forced to crawl out on a tree branch in a thunderstorm to retrieve them — and he and the shoes are both zapped by a lightning bolt just as he grabs them.

He doesn't die — but he does receive an infusion of killer hardcourt skills, which he demonstrates when he is chosen from the crowd at halftime during an NBA game. When Calvin is selected for a promotional contest to play one-on-one against Tracey Reynolds (Morris Chestnut), one of the stars of the home team, he finds that he can not only sink the three with ease but he can drive on Tracey — and dunk on him, despite barely reaching the 5-foot mark.

Before you can say "only in the movies," he's signed by the Knights' opportunistic general manager (Eugene Levy) as a one-game publicity stunt — and then signed for real when he wins a game for the beleaguered Knights. Before he knows it, he's regularly playing against the likes of Gary Payton, Jason Kidd and Chris Webber.

In the slackly written script by Michael Elliot and Jordan Moffet, none of this has much effect on the lifestyle Calvin leads. We are expected to believe that, when he's not sharing room service with roommate Tracey on the road (where he is unchaperoned), he's still living at the group home with his friends (and isn't being hounded there by the media). This, in spite of the fact that his fantasy is to be adopted by parents rich enough to make his life like the one he sees on "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air."

But then, this is a fantasy and, like most fantasies, tells a story about a young hero who learns to deserve the gifts he's been given. Lil' Bow Wow, whose first album sold more than 2 million copies, has a natural screen presence, which is all this role really calls for. And he's surrounded by pros, including Robert Forster as his gruffly good-natured coach, Chestnut as his teammate (who develops a paternal interest in him) and Levy as the craven team general manager. That's not to mention a gaggle of NBA stars.

In most ways, however, "Like Mike" is a movie for 11-year-old boys with sports dreams of their own and the many preteen girls who worship Lil' Bow Wow.

Rated PG for mild profanity.