Like Mike
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| Like Mike | |
|---|---|
 Promotional poster for Like Mike |
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| Directed by | John Schultz |
| Produced by | NBA Productions |
| Starring | Lil Bow Wow Brenda Song Morris Chestnut Jonathan Lipnicki |
| Release date(s) | July 3, 2002 |
| Language | English |
| Followed by | Like Mike 2: Streetball |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Like Mike is a 2002 movie, directed by John Schultz and starring Bow Wow and Jonathan Lipnicki. The movie was produced by Ameya Deshmukh, and features many cameo appearances by NBA stars.
[edit] Plot
Like Mike is about a trio of kids who live in an orphanage. They are best friends and they enjoy playing basketball and watching NBA games on television. They are taken by a greedy orphanage director (played by Crispin Glover) to sell chocolates after each of a fictional Los Angeles Knights NBA franchise's home games.
One night, Calvin Cambridge (Lil Bow Wow) gets to meet the team's coach, who agrees to let him and his two best friends have tickets for the next game. Calvin obtains a pair of old shoes (from a Salvation Army Thrift Store) that had been used by a great basketball player of the past. The shoes have the initials MJ written, so naturally, Calvin thinks they used to belong to Michael Jordan, although Jordan's name isn't used in the movie because he refused to have anything to do with the movie itself.[citation needed]
Calvin's shoes are stolen and thrown into some dangerous electricity cables. When he goes up and tries to get them back, he gets electrocuted, but the electrocution doesn't bring him harm, giving him the talent of the player who had used the shoes instead.
Calvin and his friends then attend the basketball game they had tickets for, and Calvin's ticket number is chosen at a half time contest where the winner would face the team's star, Tracy Reynolds (Morris Chestnut) one on one. When he dunks the ball from half-court and then goes on to beat Reynolds in the game, Calvin is signed to a contract by the Knights.
Calvin's life then follows a path of experiencing luxury for the first time while on the road and going back to his orphanage home when the team isn't traveling. He gets to see hotels and places he never imagined could exist, and he is assigned to be the roommate to Reynolds while on the road. Calvin then starts taking all the headlines and becoming the talk all around the sports media and the NBA.
While this is all happening, Calvin begins to figure out that all he wants is really a father, and he starts looking at Reynolds in a fatherly way. They slowly begin to develop a father and son relationship, although their relationship is sometimes challenged by the daily situations that a thirteen-year-old boy without a father and a single man with no kids might have to face and Reynolds' attitude toward the young player.
Meanwhile, back home, Calvin's greedy orphanage director signs a contract with the team that says that all of Calvin's money will go to him instead until he's eighteen, or adopted. When the second option is about to become true, the director decides to steal Calvin's shoes and bet US$100,000.00 against the knights.
After negotiating with OX the bully and his friends, Calvin is able to subdue the orphanage director and retrieve his shoes. However the director manages to send several goons after Calvin in a failed attempt to steal the shoes. Calvin makes it to the stadium with the shoes with just minutes to spare.
Calvin is reluctantly put into the game by the coach and the Knights start to make a comeback. However after a pile-on Calvin's shoes are ruined. Calvin eventually helps the team make the playoffs, but upon finding out about the contract, he decides to retire and announces that the last game on the regular season will be his last game. After winning their last season game, Calvin then retires.
However, after going back to his orphanage, he finds out that he was adopted by Reynolds, and he also helped his two best friends get adopted, Murph (Lipnicki) to Tracy Reynolds (Chestnut) and Calvin, and Reg (Song) to a Chinese family. It's also revealed that the orphanage director is missing because he doesn't have enough money to pay the bet and the orphanage is now under care of the Knights.
[edit] Trivia
- Like Mike was originally going to be released in June 2002.
- When they are playing the game at the Staples Center, some of the audience are carboard people, while others are kids (who got their faces changed digitally) from Boys and Girls Club of Echo Park.
- The "magical" sneakers were called the Nike Blazers, and was the very first basketball shoe manufactured in Nike's company, beginning production in 1973. Although Michael Jordan never liked Nike before signing to them in 1984, Jordan actually wore this shoe model in the late '70s when playing ball at his Laney high school.
- Prior to the film's release, there were public concern over kids imitating the power line scene, where Calvin retrieves the shoes from the power line during a thunderstorm. The makers of this film, at one point, considered putting up a warning at the beginning of the movie, telling kids not to imitate the power line scene. However, they never did it.
- The exterior view of the stadium they were playing in was Staples Center; but they actually filmed the basketball games at The Great Western Forum in Inglewood, CA
- When there's a highlight reel playing showing the Knights' loss vs. the Toronto Raptors, there is a shot of Vince Carter. The shot was actually filmed from the 2000 Slam Dunk Competition.
- The Knights colors are similar to those of the Los Angeles Clippers, whom they replace in the movie.
- In the power line scene, where Calvin tries to get his sneakers on the power line, the rain is fake. Over the set there was a pipe where water was pumped through.
- At the slam dunk competition, Calvin originally was going to go through the hoop. Afterwards they changed it because it wasn't Michael Jordan like.
- Kurtis Blow can be spotted sitting behind Calvin during the Slam Dunk competition.
- When they first started shooting, Bow Wow (Calvin) didn't want to be around Crispin Glover (Bittlemen) because he thought he was weird. But in the middle of the movie, Bow Wow saw him as a normal person.
- In the movie, Bow Wow actually made most of his shots, except for the dunks. When he's going one-on-one with Tracy (Morris Chestnut) he actually made the first two shots.
- At the start of the movie where Calvin (Bow Wow), Murph (Jonathan Lipnicki) & Reg (Brenda Song) were playing basketball at the orphanage, some of the time they didn't know they were being filmed. It was their lunch break.
- Calvin Cambridge's teacher at the orphanage, Sister Theresa is played by Anne Meara. Anne Meara is Ben Stiller's mother in real life.
