From All Movie Guide: Like Hoosiers about 20 years before it, Coach Carter is a well-done feel-good film mixing athletics with high school drama -- well, about as feel-good as any film with a fair amount of profanity and gang violence can be. It's another scenario where the underdogs are whipped into shape with tough love by an idealistic coach. Of course, it's about half a century after the time at which Hoosiers took place, and Coach Carter is in many respects a different ball game. The arena isn't whitebread rural Indiana, but the tough, ethnically mixed, disadvantaged urban neighborhoods of the San Francisco Bay Area community of Richmond. Much of the message, however, remains the same. Ken Carter (played with admirable fortitude by Samuel L. Jackson) is just as concerned with molding his boys into men with a firm disciplinary hand as he is with teaching them basketball, banking on making them winners on the court as well as in real life. The four-month turnaround in his charges' maturity, academic perf...

more