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'The Longshots'

Rating:

BY JOHN ANDERSON | Special to Newsday

August 22, 2008

If you wanted to make a parody of the sports movie genre, you might call it " The Longshots" - like, no kidding? The underdogs are gonna win?

But there are few movies out right now more genuine than this Cinderella story, in which a young girl pining for her MIA father is rescued by, and rescues, her aimless uncle ( Ice Cube). Directed by ex-Limp Bizkit front man Fred Durst (who made last year's "The Education of Charlie Banks"), it concerns the real-life Jasmine Plummer, who took her raggedy football team to the 2003 Super Bowl of Pop Warner football.

What happens there is far less important to the movie than how everyone gets where they're going. And not everything you might expect to happen is going to happen, either.

Anyone who saw Keke Palmer in "Akeelah and the Bee" knew the young actress was a find, but "Longshots" establishes her as a star-to-be and one of the more beautiful young faces around. She makes Jasmine so mournfully alone - so wounded when she's picked on by other students, and so easily taking an escape route into a world of books - that her eventual joy is cathartic, and not just for her.

Ice Cube is no slouch either - as Jasmine's uncle, who wanders around the economically and clinically depressed town of Minden with a brown-bagged Bud in his hands, Cube gives an unadorned performance that is funny when it needs to be, and moving most of the time.

This is a sports movie so, yes, emotions are milked and the unlikely happens, but "Longshots" is refreshingly free of the cloying happiness that infects most films in its genre. This is largely because it's not just a sports movie - it's the story of a community of people getting their souls out of hock because a young girl shows them the way.

PLOT High school girl resurrects herself through football, and brings her whole town along with her.

CAST Keke Palmer, Ice Cube, Garrett Morris.

LENGTH 1:34

PLAYING AT Area theaters

BOTTOM LINE Keke Palmer and Ice Cube are both irresistible, and the movie is a rough but heartfelt diamond.

STAR BUCKS

The Iceman selleth tickets

Ice Cube (nee O'Shea Jackson) has become a surefire box-office success, something few would have predicted when he burst onto the scene in the late 1980s as a member of the controversial hip-hop group NWA. Here are his five highest-grossing movies:

1. ARE WE THERE YET? (2005) - $82,674,398

2. BARBERSHOP (2002) - $75,782,105

3. ANACONDA (1997) - $65,885,767

4. BARBERSHOP 2: BACK IN BUSINESS (2004) - $65,111,277

5. THREE KINGS (1999) - $60,652,036

Source: Boxofficemojo.com