MOVIE REVIEW : ‘The Air Up There’ Is Pretty Thin

The story of an American college coach’s attempt to recruit a taller-than-tall African basketball player, “The Air Up There” (citywide) may be the first movie to be high concept both literally and metaphorically. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to make anybody happy.

A feeble and simplistic attempt at an adventure comedy, “Air” is a movie that never should have been let out of development hell. In truth, it probably snuck out, because nothing about it is as well-developed as Charles Gitonga Maina, the 6-foot-10 Kenyan who stars as Saleh, the object of that coach’s attention.

The coach is Jimmy Dolan (Kevin Bacon), a hard-driving assistant at mythical St. Joseph’s. Once known as “the mouth that scored,” Dolan is a former hot-shot college player considered too self-centered to be head coaching material. If you think all that is about to change, you’re way ahead of this game.

Determined to work his way out of the doghouse, Dolan gets the cracked idea of going to Kenya to sign up a tower of power “with the hang time of a hot-air balloon” he glimpses in the background of a video about missionaries.

That turns out to be Saleh, an affable young man (pleasantly played by Maina) who would like nothing better than matriculating in the states. However, his father (veteran South African actor Winston Ntshona) has other plans for him at home, and Dolan’s slick recruiter’s attitude is so obnoxious even a saintly nun (Yolanda Vazquez) breaks down and calls him “a sports pimp.” Will the coach have to go home empty-handed? Guess again.

The inspiration, if that is the right word, for “The Air Up There” is the careers of such transplanted-to-the-NBA stars as Nigeria’s Hakeem Olajuwon and the Sudan’s Manute Bol. Novelist Max Apple got the idea and is credited with the screenplay, though its high percentage of bathroom jokes leads one to suspect that a committee of 10-year-old boys really did the work.

If Apple was the screenwriter, he must have come up with the plot after holing up for the weekend with a gross of videos, for “The Air” (blandly directed by Paul M. Glaser) is jammed with as many narrative cliches as its hour and 46 minutes will allow.

And though the production went to the trouble of shooting in Africa and using Kenya’s Samburu tribe as the inspiration for the film’s fictional Winabi, its treatment of Africans is so cartoonish it might as well have been shot on some back lot. And of course the real purpose of having Africans in this film at all is to enable a pale face to mature and shine. Some things never do seem to change.

‘The Air Up There’

Kevin Bacon: Jimmy Dolan

Charles Gitonga Maina: Saleh

Yolanda Vazquez: Sister Susan

Winston Ntshona: Urudu

Mabutho “Kid” Sithole: Nyaga

An Interscope Communications/Polygram Filmed Entertainment production in association with Nomura Babcock & Brown and Longview Entertainment, released by Hollywood Pictures. Director Paul M. Glaser. Producers Ted Field, Rosalie Swedlin, Robert W. Cort. Executive producers Lance Hool, Scott Kroopf. Screenplay Max Apple. Cinematographer Dick Pope. Editor Michael E. Polakow. Costumes Hope Hanafin. Music David Newman. Production design Roger Hall. Set decorator Karen Mary Brookes. Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes.

MPAA rating: PG. Times guidelines: bathroom humor and an attack by a wild boar that the boar does not live to regret.