When your source material is the true story of a New Orleans high school basketball team on an improbable
post-Katrina winning streak, producing an inspirational film should be an easy layup. Yet Hurricane Season hoists up a brick. Here, the ravaged city is merely a support player, its plight trotted out to add dramatic weight to what is, essentially, a conventional underdog sports movie. It doesn’t help that the script is an endless string of motivational speeches, or that the actors—led by Forest
Whitaker, who quivers and quakes in an exhausting display of overacting as the team’s coach—play every scene with the same rim-rattling intensity. All the emotional fireworks fail to shed any meaningful light on New Orleans after the storm.
This article appears in Mar 18-24, 2010.