Teamwork Makes the Dream Work in Snoop Dog’s The UnderDoggs
Snoop Dogg’s rise from a Long Beach California 90’s rapper to the mogul he is now can be attributed to his hustle factor, which is using his brand to forge lucrative partnerships. Although fans may not be getting new music often, his shows, product releases, and friendship with Martha Stewart have kept him in the news since the 90’s. Snoop Dogg’s “Snoop Youth Football League” seems to be the inspiration for The UnderDoggs a new Amazon Prime movie starring Snoop, Tina Sumpter, and Mike Epps.
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The UnderDoggs follows Jaycen “Two J’s” (Snoop Dogg aka Calvin Brodeus) a retired football player whose inflated ego rules his entire existence. After verbally abusing a hotel worker, Jaycen gets into a car accident and lands himself in trouble. He’s forced into doing community service hours, picking up dog feces in a local Long Beach, California park.
He stumbles upon a peewee football team who has just lost their coach. A member of that peewee team’s mother is his ex-girlfriend Cherise (the luminous Tika Sumpter) so Jaycen sees this as an opportunity to complete his community service and perhaps reignite a romance with Cherise.
The problem is the kids are undisciplined, bully each other and they don’t have any football skills. Along with his friend Kareem (Mike Epps), Jaycen coaches the team with a mixture of humor, raw language (the word mfer is used countless times), and tough love to try to pull their best performances out of them. The UnderDoggs is a mixture of movies like The Bad News Bears and Friday, mixing a terrible yet redeemable sports team with sunny yet worn down parts of Long Beach.
Fans of Snoop Dogg aka Calvin Brodeus will most likely enjoy this film. It’s silly with the most ridiculous language that won’t surprise longtime supporters of him and his brand. There are crude jokes, surprising cameos, and several funny but brash moments that play on Snoop Dogg history of marijuana use and gangsta rap lyrics. For viewers who don’t know anything about the Snoop persona, this movie will probably be shocking. That’s not to say it isn’t entertaining, just that the language goes overboard when it could have been toned down.
Editors of The UnderDoggs could have cut at least fifteen minutes from the film because the ending drags on a bit too long. Still, this is the type of movie that fans expect to see Snoop Dogg as the lead of, guiding the younger generation to play their best at sports and the journey of a mentor with a gritty but funny edge.
