Like the troubled inner-city hoopsters it depicts, “Coach Carter” never strays too far from the baseline. Inspired by the true story of a California high school basketball coach who benched his entire team for poor grades in the midst of an undefeated season, the movie simply adds a sports chromosome to the tough-love DNA of “Dangerous Minds” and “Stand and Deliver.” Crammed with sentimental lay-ups and gimme platitudes, it's less a drama than a dramatic drill, run by the filmmakers to slavish near-perfection.

If you detected a note of grudging admiration in that last line, know that there is a certain low artistry in the way director Thomas Carter (“Save the Last Dance”) and screenwriters Mark Schwahn and John Gatins pander to the crowd. Within minutes of taking over the varsity coaching gig at run-down, flunkie-ridden Richmond High, sporting goods entrepreneur Ken Carter (Samuel L. Jackson) uses non-lethal force to subdue a violently defiant player (Rick Gonzalez from “Old School”).

Later, reformed and devoted to Carter, that very same player looks deep into his coach's eyes and softly, movingly recites the Marianne Williamson poem “Our Greatest Fear,” just like Nelson Mandela during his 1994 inauguration speech.

Gosh, how special. If only more positive adult role models would sacrifice their time to turn vicious street punks into poetry-spouting sissies. If only.
Speaking of pandering, audiences always like it when rigid, craven school administrators try to stop our man from doing what's right by his kids. So when Carter attempts to hold his players accountable for academic-performance contracts they signed at the start of the 1999 season and encounters stiff resistance from the Richmond principal (Denise Dowse) — voila! — all of our most simplistic biases about bureaucratic small-mindedness are tickled in kind. She also gets to tee up Jackson's snappiest, most trailer-ready one-liners. To wit:

Principal: “Basketball is all these children have!”

Coach: “I think that's the problem. Don't you?”

I can almost hear the peevish voice mails: “But it's true!” Sorry, not only is “Coach Carter” frequently, factually untrue (Carter, for instance, did not inherit a losing program; the team had a winning season in 1998), it feels untrue, which is probably a worse crime, drama-wise. As always, Jackson (“Pulp Fiction”) sells the role, but the rest of it — sexual conquests in the suburbs; R&B diva Ashanti, playing a knocked-up teen pondering a “woman's right to chose” — feels like fiction masquerading as fact.

The no-rush narrative and lengthy speechifying also push the running time well past the two-hour mark, but to what end? If you really need to hear Jackson pontificate about the “ever-elusive victory within” in the movie's waning moments, you haven't been paying attention in class.