“Hustle” doesn’t score any points for originality, unless you’ve somehow missed all those sports movies about scouts or coaches finding astonishing talent in unlikely locales. Yet Adam Sandler’s latest Netflix film — produced with, among others, LeBron James — mostly works in following that familiar playbook, peppering its NBA-level action with several rosters worth of basketball cameos.
Although the movie has no shortage of close kin (including Netflix’s “Boogie” from last year), one of its sillier ancestors would be “The Air Up There,” a 1994 movie that had Kevin Bacon locating the basketball big man of his dreams in Africa.
