Like Mike
An orphan finds a pair of beat-up sneakers initialed 'MJ,' takes a lightning strike while rescuing them from a power line, and wakes up able to dunk on NBA starters. Lil' Bow Wow's 2002 fantasy was every playground daydream with a soundtrack.
Like Mike, released by 20th Century Fox on July 3, 2002 and directed by John Schultz, ran on the simplest wish a basketball-obsessed kid ever had. Lil' Bow Wow plays Calvin Cambridge, a 13-year-old orphan who comes into a pair of old sneakers marked with the initials 'MJ' — and after being struck by lightning while retrieving them from a power line, suddenly plays like the initials promise. The fictional Los Angeles Knights sign him, Morris Chestnut's reluctant star becomes his roommate and eventually his family, and Jonathan Lipnicki, Crispin Glover, Eugene Levy, and Robert Forster fill out the orphanage-to-arena fairy tale.
The NBA itself was in on it — NBA Entertainment sits in the production credits, and the film is a time capsule of the 2002 league, with cameos from 18 NBA players including Vince Carter, Allen Iverson, Tracy McGrady, and Dirk Nowitzki. The one player conspicuously absent is the initials themselves: Michael Jordan, then playing out his Washington Wizards coda, never appears in the film.
Audiences got it even where critics shrugged: a $12.2 million opening weekend, $62.3 million worldwide against a $30 million budget, and an 'A' CinemaScore from the kids it was actually for, against a 57% Rotten Tomatoes score. For the And1-mixtape generation, Like Mike is the movie version of counting down '3... 2... 1...' on a driveway hoop — the fantasy that greatness might be transferable, and that it might pick you.
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