“Chang Can Dunk” doesn’t go the way you’d expect, and that’s a good thing.
Here’s a Disney movie about a 5-foot-8-inch Chinese American high school basketball player who bets his rival that he can dunk by the end of the season.
He gets his wish about an hour in, but there’s still a long way for the character to go — and grow — in a film that believes maturity isn’t achieved by shortcuts.The result marks the attention-worthy debut of writer-director Jingyi Shao, and exemplifies the sort of movies Disney should be making: It has its values in the right place, but doesn’t pretend its hero is perfect.
If there’s a villain in “Chang Can Dunk,” that role is arguably filled by the title character.
In time, the obsessive teen’s ultra-competitive personality winds up alienating practically everyone in his life, except
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