The vicissitudes of winning or losing a game and doing the best you can to be successful at it whether playing clean or pulling some dirty tricks are what makes of "Blue Chips" an nice film whose main character played by Nick Nolte has to fight against the odds of losing another championship for another consecutive year. Here's a full-mouthed Basketball coach with lots of anger, high intelligence, knows how to conduct a team but he doesn't have much of a good team, and to built the team of his dream, he's gonna have to select new players but not in the traditional and right way by giving extra things to his players in order to get them on his team and also in college. He can't follow the rules by the book, the ones he created to himself in order to be successful at what he does but will he manage to play the game regardless of ethics?
So, "Blue Chips" nicely builds its discourse of the importance of winning things in a fair way and shows how much someone can lose by breaking the rules. However, for a sport themed film this isn't so great as it could be, where's the director's energy to conduct the games scenes? It's not much involving when we have to watch the games but the dramatic and funny scenes compensates the trouble. Lacks energy, some thrills and at times even the dramatic sequences are monotonous and uninteresting.
Nolte confuses extreme passion for a game with some overacting but he gives a decent performance here (but can you imagine Bob De Niro in this role? It would be excellent!). And along with him we have good supportive acting by Mary McDonnell, J.T. Walsh, Ed O'Neill and basketball legends Bob Cousy, Shaquille O'Neal among others.
Right at the beginning Nolte gives this speech to the players about the impossibility of winning a game by being half-assed. You can do whatever half assed except winning. Wiser words were never spoken before and this film proves this when you have a great director like William Friedkin behind all this when it's quite visible he's not much suitable for this (and what's strange is Ron Shelton wrote this film and he's a specialist in making sport themed flicks, so why he didn't directed it in the first place?). So, in the end you can do things half-assed but just don't expect to win much sympathy, awards and recognition with it. Good film but it could've been better considering the talents involved. 6/10
So, "Blue Chips" nicely builds its discourse of the importance of winning things in a fair way and shows how much someone can lose by breaking the rules. However, for a sport themed film this isn't so great as it could be, where's the director's energy to conduct the games scenes? It's not much involving when we have to watch the games but the dramatic and funny scenes compensates the trouble. Lacks energy, some thrills and at times even the dramatic sequences are monotonous and uninteresting.
Nolte confuses extreme passion for a game with some overacting but he gives a decent performance here (but can you imagine Bob De Niro in this role? It would be excellent!). And along with him we have good supportive acting by Mary McDonnell, J.T. Walsh, Ed O'Neill and basketball legends Bob Cousy, Shaquille O'Neal among others.
Right at the beginning Nolte gives this speech to the players about the impossibility of winning a game by being half-assed. You can do whatever half assed except winning. Wiser words were never spoken before and this film proves this when you have a great director like William Friedkin behind all this when it's quite visible he's not much suitable for this (and what's strange is Ron Shelton wrote this film and he's a specialist in making sport themed flicks, so why he didn't directed it in the first place?). So, in the end you can do things half-assed but just don't expect to win much sympathy, awards and recognition with it. Good film but it could've been better considering the talents involved. 6/10