Eddie -

Lackluster basketball comedy doesn’t have anything inventive or unusual to say. Whoopi Goldberg stars as Eddie, a limo driver by day, and a rabid New York Knicks fan. The Knicks’ new owner, Wild Bill (Frank Langella), is on the lookout for a new gimmick. He finds it in Eddie, who is chosen as honorary coach during halftime of one of the games. When the crowd loves her antics, Bill decides to name her as the official head coach of the Knicks. Eddie soon learns that coaching a team is harder than it looks from the stands, and struggles to prove she is more than a joke. That’s too bad, for the movie works best when she is a joke. When Eddie tries to play it straight, it relies on the strength of its characters, which are virtually nonexistant. Aside from Goldberg and Langella, most of the actors in the film are actually pro basketball players, and while they may play some pretty good ball, they can’t act their way out of a paper bag. They aren’t helped by the script which relies on the ‘every player has one defining quirk’ style of characterization. As far as the basketball goes, some of the action is decent, but most is overchoreographed, and looks like it. Director Steve Rash should have just let the NBA stars play hoops and edited the results to fit the film…instead we have a group of unsteady actors struggling to remember to hit their marks. Basketball fans will get much more enjoyment, and probably more laughs, from watching any NBA game than from Eddie.