Eddie

By VARIETY STAFF

Hollywood. Director Steve Rash; Producer David Permut, Mark Burg; Screenplay Jon Connolly/David Loucka, Eric Champnella/Keith Mitchell, Steve Zacharias, Jeff Buhai; Camera Victor Kemper; Editor Richard Halsey; Music Stanley Clark; Art Director Dan Davis
 
Whoopi Goldberg
Frank Langella
Dennis Farina
Richard Jenkins
Lisa Ann Walter
John Benjamin Hickey
 

Sports comedies are inherently predictable, but this fantasy, about a fan who winds up head coach of an NBA team, seems especially uninspired. Whoopi Goldberg's wholehearted and likable performance, while occasionally funny, is simply not enough to lead this standard-issue programmer to victory.

Goldberg plays the title charcater, a limousine driver and vocal basketball buff who - like all New York sports fans - thinks she knows what's best for her team, in this case the ailing New York Knicks. Enter Wild Bill Burgess, a Texas zillionaire and the team's new owner, played by a woefully miscast Frank Langella. Burgess fires his sourpuss veteran coach (Dennis Farina) and replaces him with, you guessed it, Eddie. From there on, it's strictly by the numbers as Goldberg does her darnedest to light a fire under the aloof, egotistical young millionaires who make up the fictional team.

The cast of real-life players does a decent job of impersonating, well, basketball players, but they - along with everyone else in the film - function strictly as straight men to Goldberg's antics. Worst of all - given the nearly 50 NBA players who appear in the film - there aren't any good basketball scenes to speak of.

(Color) Available on VHS. Extract of a review from 1996. Running time: 100 MIN.