Why does anyone care if Chang can or cannot dunk? Jokes aside I was definitely expecting the worst with Chang Can Dunk, in some ways it’s a bit better than I thought and in others well it’s exactly what I expected it to be.
The performances are fine enough, particularly Bloom Li who’s given a script that is on the level of a bad Disney Channel Original Movie. He does what he can with it and I definitely respect him for that, Dexter Darden is decently fun as well and I actually liked Zoe Renee despite her ultimately just being the love interest and that’s it. It’s definitely one of the better made Disney+ movies, it goes for this bigger in scale type of feel which I will admit is kind of surprising to see from this sort of movie.
Unfortunately just about everything else is either terrible or falls into the forgettable category, the writing as I said earlier is not that much different from a Disney Channel movie it’s just a bit more mature with it’s tone and that’s pretty much it, the movie is very predictable to the point where you can guess what is going to happen within the first 10 minutes. The movie attempts to go for a coming of age sort of feel which doesn’t work nearly as well as they thought it did, which again comes down to the writing.
We aren’t given a whole lot of character moments with any of the characters even with Chang himself, we are given very surface level information that a lot of these Disney+ movies tend to give and then the movie decides to move on to the next scene. Part of what makes a good coming of age movie is character development and character moments, where we learn about the character, how they feel, what their goals are, who they are as a person and much more.
I can definitely respect that Chang Can Dunk at the very least attempted to try and be a coming of age movie (something you really done often see in modern Disney movies) but it doesn’t do it well here unfortunately, I definitely think with a much more focused and better written script there could have been something really great here.
Chang Can Dunk is available on Disney+
4/10 D+
Jerome Reviews... 