Admittedly, today’s review target, More Than A Game, will be a little on the esoteric side.  It’s a sports documentary about LeBron James and his old high school basketball team.  So if you’re a big LeBron James fan, well, then this is definitely going to be the movie for you.

More Than a Game is the thoroughly enlightening portrait of Lebron James and his very small high school basketball team.  This movie, however, will primarily focus on the Akron Fab Five, which includes future superstar LeBron James.

Of course, at this point, some would do well to wonder why More Than A Game appears to care not a fig about anyone outside the “Akron Fab Five”, but that’s not going to be answered in this.  There is, however, lots to say about that group of five, and we’ll hear about most of it.

It’s actually kind of revolting to hear the Akron Fab Five, who were the Akron Fab Four, talk about sacrifice and things done “for the good of the team” while there was a WHOLE TEAM that will never be heard from in this film.  It may well be the exemplar of hypocrisy to hear about how important the team is when so much of the team is relegated to little more than smiling and laughing faces in a background that weren’t deemed important enough to hear from in the face of MIGHTY SUPERSTAR LEBRON and his crew of hangers-on.

It takes a certain special kind of sheer obliviousness to wax eloquent on “the family” that a team is when so many of their “family” is relegated to the “crazy uncle who lives in the attic and we lock him in there” status.

But aside from this rather glaring omission, this is pretty much par for the course as far as sports documentaries go.  You’ve got to love the sheer amount of newspaper clippings and bits of sports television that are peppered into this movie.  It really lends to the authenticity of the whole affair, and gives it a credibility that little else could have.

More Than A Game has plenty of problems to it, but it also has that certain air of triumph that you look for in a documentary like this.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives More Than A Game a six out of ten for being fairly textbook and having some serious problems, but also doing those things that it should do correctly.