By Lamar Caldwell
Sports movies are always fun and entertaining to watch. Amateur, is a Netflix original movie directed by Ryan Koo in 2018. It is a basketball movie and the main character is played by a well known actor, Michael Rainey Jr.. His character’s name is Terron Forte and he plays basketball for his local school team. One day he was practicing in his backyard and was approached by a coach from a powerhouse team called Liberty Prep. Terron was recruited to go play for them by the coach.
When he first gets to the new school he has a hard time adjusting and everything is different for him. He is playing with a bunch of older guys and facing older people. The show is called Amateur because Terron is an amateur and he’s only in 8th grade. There were a lot of challenges that Terron faced that he had to overcome. Not only did he have a hard time adjusting to a new school but he also had dyslexia. This gave him a hard time focusing in school and he couldn’t see numbers correctly which caused him to struggle in math and on the court. He couldn’t interpret the number on the scoreboard. The director effects that made the numbers on the shot clock look distorted as how Terron would see it which I thought was really clever.
When Terron ends up fitting in on the team everything starts going well and he overcomes a lot of adversity. When the shot clock is winding down his coach counts it down for him. Social media also plays a big role in this movie. It affected him in a good way and ended up affecting him in a bad way. Terron used social media a lot and he would go live and do things with his team teammates. Social media helped him a lot because there were videos of him playing and scouts got to see the videos and he was playing really well. It affected him in a bad way because he recorded a conversation with his coach and his dad talking about something and if the video got out the team and the coach could face serious consequences.
Ryan Koo captures really well what happens in modern day basketball with recruiting and social media. Michael Rainey Jr. plays his role very well as well as the coach who forms a strong bond with Terron throughout the movie. Overall, the movie has a good story and I recommend any sports or basketball fan to watch. I would give this movie an 8/10 flames.
