Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Underdoggs’ on Amazon Prime Video, a Snoop Dogg Stoner-Sports Comedy Filled With Cursing Children

Potty mouths, smoking pot and, uh, wearing a pot on your head all come together in The Underdoggs (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video), a heavy-cursing stoner-football comedy produced by and starring the only person you know with a double-g in his name: Calvin Broadus Jr., of course! He plays a retired former pro football star and mega-egotist who – get this – you’re not gonna believe it – no really this is totally nuts – ends up coaching a pee-wee team of lovable misfits and helping them go from major suckitude to, maybe, gridiron glory. It’s the somewhat rare instance in which Snoop Dogg ends up playing someone who isn’t Snoop Dogg, although his character here is so Snoop Doggy, you can barely tell the difference. Let it be known that this is very much an R-rated movie, because the children in the cast drop enough F-bombs, B-bombs, A-bombs, MF-bombs, S-bombs and LMNOP-bombs to nuke the sensitive sensibilities of every PTA parent from here to Honduras. The question is whether the movie is mighty, or just, you know, bad news.

THE UNDERDOGGS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We open with a brief history of Jaycen Jennings (Snoop): Back in 1997, he one-handed a hail mary for a TD in high school, and rode it to not-the-NFL-because-it’s-probably-too-expensive-to-license-the-logo fame and fortune. He was “the pick picked before all the other picks,” and then a pro superstar – but he was so volatile, he dropped a lot of passes and ended up playing for too many teams and smacked a kid once, rendering him more infamous than famous. Nowadays, he’s so blinged out with crazy hair and fancy tracksuits and a gold-plated Mercedes SUV, you need three pairs of sunglasses just to glance at him. But the sad reality is, all he does is sit around his mansion adorned with massive monuments to his ego, smoking weed, recording a shitty podcast nobody listens to, pestering his agent and getting mad at the daytime sports-TV talking-head blabbermouth who antagonizes him. Seems like a comfortable-enough life, but Jaycen perhaps almost maybe feels an inner stirring of spiritual discontent, the likes of which a disgracefully familiar worn-out-ass movie plot just might bring to the surface.

One fateful day, Jaycen peels out of a parking lot in his sports car and gets reamed by a bus and ends up in court wearing a neckbrace, getting sentenced to community service for reckless driving or whatever. And of course he has to perform it in Long Beach, where he grew up. He ends up scooping dog turds in the park while wearing his Super Bowl ring, which is such an accurate portrait of who he is, even Michelangelo with the world’s most earnest block of marble couldn’t have captured such painful truth. And it’s with a bucketful of shit over his shoulder that he runs across a football team of little shits whose coach ditched them – and one of the football moms is his old flame, Cherise (Tika Sumpter). How about that. Could he possibly complete his community service by coaching the team and pursue his lost love at the same time? Sure seems like it.

Before you know it, Jaycen is whipping the team into shape by calling 10-year-olds MFers and a-holes and giving them nicknames like Ghost and Superstar and Titties. Yes, Titties. Because the fumble-prone boy needs to hold onto the ball like it’s a titty. The logic is flawless. It’s just damn good coaching, you know. Jaycen’s helped out by his goofy old compat Kareem (Mike Epps), and of course, the rival team of gigantic pituitary cases is coached by the aforementioned sports-TV doofus who hates him, so when they play each other, shit’s personal as shit. Jaycen inspires the kids a little and buys them blinged-out uniforms and helmets and before you know it they’re making great tight-window throws and hitting the B-gap hard and executing sound tackling and finding themselves on the way to the damn championship game, not that we ever saw any of this coming. Not a bit.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: There’s a direct reference to The Mighty Ducks right in the dialogue, so that doesn’t count. So let’s just say The Underdoggs is Car Wash meets Bad News Bears and call it good.

Performance Worth Watching: She’s not given much to do, and deserves more screen time, but Sumpter gamely tries to ground this movie with at least a little bit of earnest sincerity among all the cliches and rampant silliness. 

Memorable Dialogue: An excerpt from one of Jaycen’s inspiring speeches to his team: “We the same. We underdogs. The dog underneath the dog that’s always gettin’ pissed and shitted on. But today, I’m done pissin’ and shittin’ on you kids. I look at y’all now and I don’t see a bunch of assholes. I see me in every last one of y’all.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: You might want to hit the dispensary for some bumberry-flavored giggle gummies before you fire up this one, because you’ll need to lubricate the laugh-gears a bit to get them clicking. Not that The Underdoggs is a total comedy dud; like most big, dumb, broad comedies, it hits one minute and misses the next. You’ll bristle at the utterance of a hack-ass line like “Hashtag worst role model ever!”; you’ll feel guilty for snickering at a kid declaring, “I don’t think that’s how penises work.” This joke completion-percentage is how these types of misfits-learn-the-value-of-teamwork-while-the-coach-learns-something-about-himself movies inevitably play out, although this one is significantly more linguistically filthy than most.

Snoop isn’t exactly being challenged here – he plays an extension of his persona, which on its own is genial enough to fill a 96-minute movie with about 70 minutes of relatively endearing goodwill charisma. The Underdoggs opens with a cheeky disclaimer about the salty language therein, then slams home a punchline that begins with “But f— all that,” thus establishing a playfully profane tone. There are moments where it risks breaching the barriers of offensiveness – e.g., a scene in which children slam beers through an improvised bong made from a pool noodle – but for the most part, it plays it relatively safe and mostly harmless, and sticks to the usual bodily-fluid comedy and crass insults. As expected for a Snoop joint, the movie’s comedy mileage will vary greatly depending on your sobriety level, or if you’re of the age where you’re sneak-watching it and stifling your laughter so your parents don’t hear. 

Our Call: The Underdoggs offers absolutely nothing new, not that we’re yearning for auteur-level narrative innovation from a Snoop Dogg stoner-sports comedy. So maybe if you set your expectations low enough, or are high enough, you should STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.