The Longshots ( *** )

94 minutes

In theaters August 22, 2008

Rating: PG, Comedy-drama

For further proof of the adage that sports movies aren't really about sports, look no further than The Longshots.

There's hardly a convincing moment in the on-the-field action sequences, and yet this sweet-natured dramedy is an enjoyable and satisfying family entertainment.

It's inspired by the story of the first and only female player in the history of the Pop Warner football tournament.

Keke Palmer, so impressive in 2006's terrific Akeelah and the Bee, is fatherless Jasmine Plummer who, at the age of 11, is a misfit at school. But she somehow becomes the only girl on her local Pop Warner team in MInden Illinois. Playing quarterback, no less.

Ice Cube, also one of the film's producers, plays her father's brother, Uncle Curtis, who was a high school football star back in the day. Today, he's an unemployed loner, not terribly motivated to do much of anything but carry a football around and drink. But his sister-in-law, Jasmine's single mom, signs him on to babysit his niece and he discovers that she has the athletic skills that suggest success with the two-minute drill. So he helps her become the quarterback of the stumbling Browns, over the objections of only the non-girls on the team. Which is to say: everybody.

And Curtis becomes one of the team's coaches, not only reclaiming his own mojo, but helping to restore modest Minden to former glory -- or at least respectability -- as the local team works its way towards the Pop Warner Super Bowl.

The Longshots (originally titled Comeback) was directed by Fred Durst (The Education of Charlie Banks), who used to be the frontman for the musical group, Limp Bizkit, and is attempting a Hollywood comeback of his own behind the movie camera.

He doesn't succeed in making his football footage believable -- we never buy, for example, that Jasmine can really throw bullet passes and play quarterback on this team -- but he gets the family dynamics and the small-town rituals just right, and offers a considerable amount of naturalistic humor in the early going.

Perhaps best of all, he gets what is easily the most charming and effective performance of Ice Cube's career out of his leading man, who has improved to a considerable degree in the acting department. Because of his work, we root even more for Curtis than we do for the team.

Keke Palmer isn't stretched and challenged as she was in Akeelah and the Bee, but -- everywhere but over center -- this fine young actress is still up to the task.

The script, by Nick Santora and Doug Atchison, features shades of other inspirational sports dramas, such as The Bad News Bears, Hoosiers, Rudy, and The Mighty Ducks. But The Longshots builds to its own kind of heartwarming conclusion, and not in as predictable way as you might expect.

Proving once again that a movie needn't be X's-and-O's credible to be emotionally satisfying, this late-summer longshot runs the two-hour drill, overcomes its down-the-field weaknesses, and scores.