Awful April continues, and frankly folks, it doesn’t exactly get better from here. We’ve got another stinker from the past decade-which, honestly, is odd. You would think that by now, more than a century since the beginning of movie-making, we’d be able to not make cinematic schlock.
You’d be wrong. You’d be dead wrong.
Hollywood loves to dress up men in drag. Who knows why? Certainly I’d rather not get into the Freudian aspects of that, simply because this is MasterChugs Theater, not DoctorChugs Couch. Sometimes, they can be halfway decent-see Some Like It Hot for inspiration like that. Most of the time though, they’re just bad-see Sorority Boys and Tootsie.
And then there’s Juwanna Mann, a film most probably hailing from the bowels of Beelzebub.
Basketball superstar Jamal is the hottest player in the sport, but also the most detested. Suspended indefinitely from the game for his on and off the court behavior, Jamal finds his finances, his women, and his popularity flushed down the drain. Finding no way to restart his career as a man, Jamal becomes Juwanna, and joins a professional female basketball team. With the help of his teammates, and agent, Juwanna becomes the star of the sport, but as soon as her stock rises, so does the demand for Jamal, leaving the torn superstar at odds about who he/she wants to continue on as.
If only the film had heart at all. Instead, recycled cross-dressing jokes beat in the chest of a premise that produced belly laughs in 1959, but feels flat, crass and lifeless here. Tell-tale signs of Juwanna Mann’s age first appear at the Charlotte Coliseum. Ignore the irony of director Jesse Vaughan’s camera panning the faces of a rowdy crowd in a city that lost its pro basketball team months ago. Instead, just scan the team on the floor, peppered with former Charlotte Hornets players like Vlade Divac and Muggsy Bogues, who retired from the game after the 2001 season.
Bradley Allenstein’s screenplay deserves to get whistled for the foul. His action lacks consistency and awareness of self that deflates the film’s inner logic. NBA superstars like Kobe Bryant are referenced, despite the fact that the film functions with fictional teams existing in a made-up league. And while money appears to be Jeffries’ sole motivation initially, the fact that he’ll make one-tenth his UBA salary in the women’s league never occurs to him.
Every other female character on the team has one of two colors: the mustachioed manly type and the lesbian. Potshots at feminine leagues were hardly deemed hilarious when they were used by sports columnists way back in 1996, when the real WNBA first claimed, “We’ve Got Next.” Here they feel as fresh as bananas left under the refrigerator in August.
The utter lack of originality ultimately makes Juwanna Mann unwatchable. You mostly have to sit through female mustache jokes and double entendres about “balls” to get to the trip, and the journey ain’t pretty. This movie is piss.