Kyle Lee Watson is a cocky high school basketball star. Bugaloo (Marlon Wayans) is his loudmouth friend. Flip Johnson (Bernie Mac) is a local homeless guy. Tommy Shepard (Leon) is a high school security guard who secretly used to be a star player. His brother Birdie (Tupac Shakur) is a local drug lord. Shep starts going out with Kyle's mother. Kyle falls under Birdie's influence.

This movie starts with a ridiculous scene. Shep and his friend are playing basketball on the roof of a building. There's no fence. The friend tries to dunk and smash through the backboard falling to his death. The setup is stupid to begin with but it also looks stupid. It takes awhile for the movie to regain its credibility. It helps that there are some good acting going on here. I especially like Leon and Tupac. They are compelling brothers. I really like their story and their chemistry. The rest are solid. I just wish they redo that opening scene.

What a cast - and even the ones you may not expect to like as much do a really good job. So maybe the Wayans in here is nothing more than ... what he is in reality, but he also proved with Darren Arronofsky that he can actually act - I sometimes wonder why he never took that route. But another actor in this never had the chance to go any route ... and Tupac Shakur shows that he is or could have been quite the good actor.

Overall the story is quite predictable and it is the actors that make this something that may seem more than worthwhile. Not sure about all the basketball scenes in this, but they are more than decent enough to keep you interested and on the edge of your seat.

After about 18 years, I finally watched the entirety of Above the Rim on YouTube. In this one, Shep (Leon) has nightmares of the time his buddy Nutso (Matthew Guletz) was killed when they played basketball on the roof of an apartment. Several years later, he becomes a guard for various high school basketball games in which one Kyle Lee Watson (Duane Martin) is the star player who's in danger of becoming too arrogant for his own good to the chagrin of his coach Rollins (David Bailey) and his mother Mailika (Tonya Pinkins). In addition, he and his friend Bugaloo (Marlon Wayans) are hangin' with a drug dealer named Birdie (Tupac Shakur) who we find out is Shep's brother. Other somewhat important characters include a bum named Flip (Bernie Mac) and an associate of Bridie's named Motaw (Wood Harris). I'll stop there and just say this was quite a compelling drama with some humorous scenes involving both Mac and Marlon, not to mention Iris Little Thomas as a waitress who tries to come on to Shep. And unlike some other films that I watched recently that dealt with ghetto life, this one seems to lean toward a more hopeful ending for some of the more deserving characters. So in summary, I quite enjoyed Above the Rim. P.S. Both Ms. Pinkins and Harris are natives of my birthtown of Chicago, Ill.