Plot: Jaycen “Two Js” Jennings is a washed-up ex-professional football star who has hit rock bottom. When Jaycen is sentenced to community service coaching the Underdoggs, an unruly pee-wee football team in his hometown of Long Beach, California, he sees it as an opportunity to rebuild his public image and turn his life around. As Jaycen works to transform the foul-mouthed Underdoggs into top-notch champions, he reconnects with his past, including an old flame and a few of his ex-teammates, and rediscovers his love of the game.
Review: Underdog stories have always been popular fodder for movies. Redemption stories about athletes and tales of scrappy kids needing a mentor are equally popular. From The Bad News Bears to Little Giants and The Mighty Ducks, sports comedies have always found success. With The Underdoggs, that appeal is tested by taking the formula that made those aforementioned films successful and injecting them with enough profanity to garner an R rating. Inspired by Snoop Dogg’s love of sports, including his experience as a coach and running a league for underprivileged youth in Los Angeles, The Underdoggs has all the hallmarks of classic sports movies. It also, unfortunately, has all of the cliches as well. With a cast of child actors who seem to be having a blast dropping f-bombs and emulating Snoop himself, this movie is just too generic to be inspirational.
The concept, down to the dee oh double gees in the title, comes from the story pitch with Snoop Dogg and Constance Schwartz-Morini. With Snoop aboard as producer with Black-ish creator Kenya Barris and others, The Underdoggs was originally envisioned as a theatrical release, Snoop Dogg’s first since 2004’s Soul Plane. A shift was made to Prime Video when the producers realized an R-rated comedy would be a hard sell at the post-pandemic box office. This was likely the best decision as the film is not all that funny. The film opens with a disclaimer about the profanity in the film before saying this is how kids really talk and dropping some f-bombs of its own. We then get a crash course in the rise and fall of Jaycen Jennings, a high school football player who makes an amazing catch and parlays it into a college and NFL career. Long looking out for himself, Two Js alienates himself from every team he plays for and is relegated to making a podcast, hoping his agent, Ryan Kaufman (Kal Penn), can get him a commentator role on television. When things don’t pan out, Two Js is involved in a car accident and sentenced to community service in his old Long Beach neighborhood.
Two Js run into his old friend Kareem (Mike Epps), high school coach (George Lopez), and former girlfriend Cherise (Tika Sumpter) while visiting a pee-wee football team in need of a new coach. Realizing that the good PR from coaching underprivileged kids could get him back in the limelight, Two Js anoints himself as their new celebrity mentor. Right off the bat, Two Js learns that coaching is much more challenging than expected. Each of the kids on the team has their own issues they are dealing with, which allows Two Js to give them nicknames in accordance with their issues. There is Ghost (Kylah Davila), who never removes their helmet; Tony (Adan James Carrillo), who drops the ball and thus earns the name Titties; and Cherise’s son Tre (Jonigan Booth), whom Two Js shares a lot in common with. The rest of the kids on the team check off the formulaic cliches every movie like this has, including the nerdy kid, the flashy kid who can’t ball, and the poor kid hiding that he lives in a trailer park. As the challenges ramp up, including the rival team, the Colonels, who are coached by Two Js’ nemesis Chip Collins (Andrew Schulz).
You can tell that The Underdoggs had higher aspirations than a direct-to-streaming debut, as evidenced by the big-name NFL cameos, including Tony Gonzalez, Deion Sanders, Terry Bradshaw, Curt Menefee, Michael Strahan, Howie Long, and Jay Glazer. Aside from some scenes filmed inside the NFL on FOX sets, most of the action in this series takes place on a small football field. Much of the charm of this movie is reliant on Snoop Dogg learning lessons and giving things to the kids both in mentorship and blinged-out swag, like new jerseys sponsored by Raising Canes Chicken Fingers. There is certainly ambition to tell a feel-good story here, but it is stunted by the unnecessary profanity that earned this film its R rating. Snoop plays a lot of himself as Two Js, including unrelenting swearing and weed smoking. While the drugs and kids don’t mix on screen, the swearing loses its charm pretty quickly and cannot hide the weak script beneath it.
The creative talent behind The Underdoggs is shocking in that they didn’t help the finished product become more than a cookie-cutter project with extra swearing. Producers Kenya Barris and Jonathan Glickman (Creed III) have solid track records with successful and well-made films and series, but that does not help this movie. Screenwriters Isaac Schamis and Danny Segal, veterans of Barris’ series Grown-ish and film #BlackAF, mine the countless sports films before The Underdoggs and reuse all their tropes and jokes. Early in The Underdoggs, there is even a direct reference to Emilio Estevez in The Mighty Ducks, so it was not lost on the writers where these ideas came from. Director Charles Stone III made his directorial debut in 2002 with the solid film Drumline before making successful comedies like Mr. 3000 and Uncle Drew while working on the NBC series Friday Night Lights and Kenya Barris series Black-ish and Mixed-ish. Stone is familiar with sports movies and comedies and working with the producers and writers of The Underdoggs. Yet, even he cannot overcome the mediocre material he was given.
The uneven first half of The Underdoggs makes it very difficult to give the movie an opportunity to rise above its weak script, but it starts to find some momentum when Two Js realizes the error of his ways. Still, the kid characters never really get to develop past superficial challenges, and the romance between Two Js and Cherise barely rises above a simmer. Mike Epps seems to be having the most fun of anyone in the cast, and when Snoop Dogg stops trying to act and is just natural, the film works better. Unfortunately, it is a little too late as the ending of The Underdoggs is much better than the movie that came before it. As the end credits played photos from Snoop’s youth football league and shared a positive message about teamwork, sports, and supporting underprivileged kids, I was touched and wondered why there wasn’t more of that in the movie I had just watched. The Underdoggs is mediocre at best despite having its heart in the right place.