You’d expect an animated basketball movie with four-time NBA champion Stephen Curry in the producer’s chair to be an easy lay-up. So why is “GOAT” such a brick?
Despite a wondrously textured, kinetic world and some interesting oddball characters, the movie is undone by a predictable, saccharine script. It’s as easy to see the steps coming as a Curry three-pointer arching into the net.
The movie has the kind of lazy, thin writing that feels like it all could have derived from a boozy Hollywood happy hour get-together: “Bro, bro. Wait. What if the GOAT was an actual goat?”
It centers on Will Harris, a goat with dreams of becoming a great baller, voiced by “Stranger Things” star Caleb McLaughlin. Undersized and an orphan, Will is a delivery driver for a diner and late on his rent. He’s a great outside shooter but a liability in the paint, unless he learns, that is.
He lives in Vineland — a hectic urban landscape with graffiti and living vines that choke the playgrounds — and is a rabid supporter of the local franchise, the Thorns. His idol is veteran Jett Fillmore, a leopard who’s the league’s all-time leading scorer, nicely voiced by Gabrielle Union. The Thorns are a bit of a mess, despite Jett’s brilliance.
The game here is called roarball, a high-intensity, co-ed, multi-animal, full-contact sport derived from basketball with a hollow ball that has small holes. It’s a “Mad Max” sport — ultraviolent, unofficiated and the dangers lurk not just from the beefy opponents but from the arena itself. The championship award is called the Claw.
The best part of the movie may be the environments for the other arenas — lava in one, a swamp with stalagmites and stalactites in another, plus an ice-bound one and another with desert sandstorms and rocks.
There seem to be only two kinds of points scored here — blazing windmills, cutting tomahawks and spectacular alley-oop dunks or slow-mo threes from so far downtown they might as well be in a different ZIP code. No midrange jumpers, bro.
