Amateur (2018) Reviews

• A realistic story

  eldrimezini2018-04-09

  Amateur is a simple story that shows the struggles of a talented young basketball player to fit on his new team.This movie reports the corruption on basketball and the way that it has changed.The actors were great,the plot was emotional and really enjoyable.One thing I didn't like about this movie was that the pace of it because it was quite slow.But in general this movie is great and I recommend it.

• Could've been so much more

  drjay_872018-04-22

  I wanted this to be so much more than it was. Not much weight to its construction and some might even say it lacks genuine feel for the game or the struggle of being a modern student athlete.

• incomplete movie, but good

  santiagoduquec2019-04-04

  The movie is very attractive and interesting, but it also has some things to correct. The film is about a very talented young basketballer, he has difficulties in terms of understanding numbers, which leads him to find new and different ways to communicate with his team and to understand everything from the plays to the scoreboards. The father of this boy is sick because he played many years in an american football team that of course left marks on him, at first it is difficult because his teammates make life impossible, but all this changes when he begins to play. Time later he learns that all his school grades are modified for his good, almost does not have to work to pass the subjects and this will not only be at his school but also at the university. All this is about to change the moment he finds out that his basketball coach bought him with the help of his father, the indignant boy records a conversation between the coach and his father where the truth is discovered, which leads to the total expulsion of the coach and the boy, that is, he will never be able to play basketball again, if not for a clever desicion of the boy who decides to become professional, in this way he would continue his career and he would get ahead along with his family thanks to his earnings. The key moment in the movie was the part where the boy finds out the truth about how he has been sold and decides to do something about it. I think script was interesting but it needed to have more information or be longer The movie flowed really well, it had good effects, but also it was so short so it finished abruptly. The costume was so good for the movie, you realaized what a real basketball team looks like. The movie was filmed in a really realistic location, because first you saw an amateur basketball court and then you get surprised looking at the real and professional basketball court. I think the soundtrack could be better because you didn´t feel involved in the movie at all because the sound was not right. In conclution the movie is so good, you can have fun watching it, but also its missing something important that it should have, or they spend too much time explaining something thats easy to understand.

• Anticlimactic

  fmwongmd2019-01-13

  A somewhat befuddled storyline; somewhat good acting by Michael Ranney Jr..

• Good subject, bad execution.

  spaceboy-954342018-05-18

  This movie had all of the right ingredients for a powerful message, but failed to stick together in time for the final product. This kid had severe Dyscalculia, where he depends on blocks in incrementing sizes to correlate numbers with it's context. Even worse, he is at the level where he needs someone to interpret the scoreboard for him. There are references to athletes like Kobe or Lebron who made it to the pros without focusing on academics. Those two players did not make it to the top as dumb jocks. They have athleticism AND intelligence. So this 8th grade kid comes out of nowhere and attends a school with competitive sports program, and even makes his way into a starting spot within a day of joining. Somehow this team improves because of him and they are in the spotlight, and even receive upgrades to their equipment. Then there is his father whose hopes of being a professional athlete got derailed and suffers long term affects of a concussion. The kid is somehow convinced his dreams to be a professional athlete will come true, and that his father was destined to suffer his own fate. If this was not delusional, the father pushes his child to enter this student-athlete system and out smart it. While all of this is happening, this kid got a look under the hood of this student-athlete process, records a conversation and posts it on social media, and that's the end of his journey. After all that, the moral of the story is, schools use student-athletes, and these said students get nothing in return. There is no development of character! If a boy wants to be a professional basketball player, wouldn't it be helpful to at the very least be able to read the scoreboard? This movie implies it's okay to ignore academics if it is considered acceptable. It is sad how kids get baited into becoming a student-athlete, but this case has a living example of what it's like to be one and not succeed. How can they now learn from this?