Ray Burke (André Holland) is representative of draft number 1 rookie Erick Scott (Melvin Gregg), who has not seen a dollar since signing his first contract with a New York NBA team, and in the middle of a lockout or, rather , a strike of the union of players faced with the owners of the teams for lack of agreement on how much to win (during a lockout, no team can negotiate with representatives and / or players), endangers the rookie and Ray must arrange to get him a salary to ensure your career.
Like Moneyball (2011) and Draft Day (2014) the action is outside the courts, where the true power of the sport resides, where the enslaving green of the athletes runs. Soderbergh and screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney (author of Moonlight) put Ray and Erick as an excuse to talk about what's behind a sport that moves millions, the flag of African-American culture. Sport with which it was thought that it would be liberating but that it became one more wheel of the exploitation of white on black, in which white owners only see merchandise in the black athlete, and Ray enters to unlock the conflict. I don't want to give details so as not to spoil, but when the character understands this and attacks the problem in commercial terms, he gets the attention of the white blacksmith.
Among the performances, André Holland is the highlight, as is Bill Duke (the black mouth and fret face of Predator and Commando) who acts as a youth coach (a kind of Griffa or Maddoni or Cornejo in football) and who best marks the feeling of the athlete in the sport business. The gap that I find is in the love interest between Erick and Sam (Zazie Beetz) as a secondary plot line that is loose, except for a specific scene that I will not say so as not to spoil, but which closes the subtext message that has the film.
To say that Soderbergh filmed it with a cell phone should not surprise because he already did it last year with Unsane (Disturbed). Eye, a cell phone that is not any one, we talk about an iPhone 8 that comes out of 40 lucas with luck and surely something retouched as a car ready to run, I do not think it is a cell phone for mortals. But, for what we see of the film it fulfills its function perfectly for a brief but well-maintained staging, giving naturalness to each shot and a feeling of openness to the narrated. Since he “retired” from the cinema to return to the Riquelme in Argentinos, the films of the director of Traffic and Ocean’s Eleven show an artisanal care. Before it was a banquet and now it is a bite, the good one of Steven, who filmed with few actors, few locations and in two weeks. With the filmmaker's last name and these numbers, any producer would rub his hands, and Netflix did not sleep.
Soderbergh not only directs, but does photography and editing. An addition that he used to make visible this underworld of sport were fragments of athletes who were rookies at the time talking directly to the camera and in black and white, telling their experiences. This is how Reggie Jackson of Detroit Pistons, Donovan Mitchell of Utah Jazz and Karl-Anthony Towns of Minnesota Timberwolves pass.
It is not a film in which we will find great evolutions of the characters, it is a film with rather flat characters, but the important thing is the subtext that lies in the story, which works perhaps more for those who like basketball, especially the NBA . For those who don't like this sport, it will be a film without sorrow or glory, filmed by Soderbergh with an iPhone 8.