‘Chang Can Dunk’ Review: Director Jingyi Shao’s Debut Takes Disney+ Originals to New Heights
variety.comPeter Debruge Chief Film Critic “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 (that’s neither spoiler nor surprise, since the title literally tells us that Chang can dunk), 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 (tenaciously embodied by Bloom Li, who keeps us wondering how to feel about Chang).
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