Movie Review – Slam Dunk Ernest

Slam Dunk Ernest (1995)
Written by John Cherry and Daniel Butler
Directed by John Cherry

The final three Ernest films were direct-to-video releases, making it very clear that the salad days of Disney financing were long gone. It wasn’t a terrible move. As we can see today, theatrical release is hardly the primary way people engage with media. What would Ernest have been like in the streaming age? He’d likely end up on some platform like Pureflix, especially looking at these final three. If, in watching these movies, you think they resemble television far more, you wouldn’t be wrong. I can easily see these being cut way down and being episodes of a low-budget streaming series.

You likely won’t believe me, but Ernest (Jim Varney) is a janitor in this movie. He works at a local mall and wants to join his co-workers’ basketball team, “Clean Sweep.” They are competing in a city league tournament, and they only let him in when they need one more player to complete their roster. During the games, Ernest stays a benchwarmer. When he finally gets called into play, he makes many mistakes, costing the team the game. He’s visited by an angel (Karem Abdul-Jabar) who offers Ernest a pair of magical shoes but is warned to not misuse them. Well, you can see where this is going, and through the experience, Ernest learns a vital lesson…about something or other.

The last time Ernest played someone who wasn’t a cleaner was Ernest Saves Christmas (he’s a taxi driver), which means the character has held that occupation for four films. It feels pretty lazy to keep presenting him in that job when he’s a character that could be any sort of blue-collar profession. We will see Ernest in another career in the next film, but for now, he’s just cleaning up after other people again. The film also tries to give our protagonist a love interest, an idea I never saw work in the series. This is a bit different in that Erma ends up being part of a plot by the Devil (yes, the Devil shows up here) to get Ernest to misuse his magical basketball shoes.

Slam Dunk Ernest is when I realized I wasn’t laughing at all while watching these movies. There was some charm to Jim Varney mugging for the camera early in the series, but now it all felt like a formula with the components being plugged in. Ernest does a bit of physical comedy that would kill an average person; he talks like he’s an expert of some kind and is immediately proven a fool, and he ends up in some ridiculous scenario. Like classic comedies, there are subplots with normie characters. In this instance, we have Quincy, the son of the Clean Sweep captain. He wants those same magic shoes and ends up a pawn in the Devil’s schemes, which only Ernest can subvert.

Making a film centering on basketball wasn’t a bad idea in 1995. This was at the height of professional basketball’s popularity in the United States, fueled by the mania surrounding Michael Jordan and trickling down to other superstar players in the league. Space Jam would be released in the theaters in the following years, so Ernest was in the middle of a trend. The problem is the level of effort put into the script. Everything about the film is so bland & dull. Sitting through the predictable and unfunny plot becomes a genuine slog as it tumbles onto the floor.

Something shifted from the early films where Ernest is an endearing character we root for. Instead, our main character is pathetic and gets shit on from start to finish. He wins in the end, but the journey there is pretty miserable. We end up feeling pity for Ernest more than anything else. Think back to Ernest Saves Christmas or Scared Stupid, in which the character has some agency and is heroic. Part of the problem is that Ernest feels superfluous to the subplots in the movie. He eventually intersects with them, but you get the sense that he could be cut from the film, and it would still play out as the most substandard Disney Channel flick.

If Slam Dunk reads as familiar, it’s because the underlying skeleton of the plot is way too close to Ernest Goes to School. Both films have our title characters given superpowers and turning into jerks due to them. By the picture’s end, Ernest learns he is better without these special abilities. By adding this bizarre moralistic subplot with the literal Devil and an angel, it never feels like it meshes with the main basketball story. Other than casting Abdul-Jabar as the angel, it might not have been in the picture.

You can feel Cherry and Varney phoning it in at this point. In an interview around this time, Varney says they would keep making Ernest movies until they stopped making money. It was good of him to be so honest. These movies aren’t art. They are a way for Varney to keep money in his account and be able to pay his bills. If anything, he is a great representative of a working-class actor. Varney certainly had bigger dreams and wanted to star on Broadway, but he knew people must work. By not seeing himself above any form of acting, he could make that his full-time job – from children’s theater when he was young to commercials to voice-over work. He was a genuine working actor.