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What: “He Got Game”

There are more letters to be lost in a game of H-O-R-S-E than there are great movies about basketball, but there was much hope that “He Got Game”--with Spike Lee directing and Denzel Washington in the lead role--would finally flesh out the short list.

And Lee is clearly aiming for greatness with this film, which opens grandly, with sun-bathed slow-motion footage of everyday people lofting jump shots at makeshift baskets nailed to barns and on fenced-in urban playgrounds--all set to the swelling strains of Aaron Copland’s symphonic music.

(Thankfully he spares us from any nausea-inducing soliloquies about the “goodness of the game” by James Earl Jones, but the effect is no less cloying than that treacly mash note to baseball, “Field of Dreams.”)

Greatness, however, eludes Lee here, because “He Got Game” labors under the burden of a script so formulaic it is difficult to not imagine the Lee of 10 years ago grimacing as he flipped through it.

First, the most improbable base premise: Jake Shuttlesworth (played by Washington), doing 20 years in Attica for murder, is granted a one-week furlough by the governor to try and convince his blue-chip prospect son (played by Ray Allen of the Milwaukee Bucks) to sign a letter of intent with the governor’s alma mater, the fictional Big State University. If Jake succeeds, the governor says he will see what he can do about shortening Jake’s sentence.

But Jake and his son Jesus--the name becomes a running gag throughout the movie--are estranged. Jesus wants no part of Jake or his letter of intent, Jake is running out of time, so (strike up more Copland) their familial tug-of-war comes down to a climactic game of one on one.

The only real surprise in the movie is Allen, who, as a rookie actor assigned to play foil to the formidable Washington, more than holds his own. Credit the eight weeks of acting lessons Allen took last summer--and maybe pass the instructor’s phone number along to Shaquille O’Neal (who, amusingly, appears in a cameo here).

Distributed by Touchstone Pictures, “He Got Game” has a chance to be Lee’s most popular movie. (Lee working for Disney; yes, these are the late 1990s.) But it falls short of the basketball pantheon, settling to rest somewhere between “Hoop Dreams” and “Blue Chips.”