Feel-good sports movies are a dime a dozen, and Stick carries on their tradition.
The catch is that instead of handling its redemptive underdog tale in a crisp 90 minutes, Jason Keller’s Apple TV+ series, premiering June 6, spends a whopping five-and-a-half hours on its familiar story. Stretching clichés so thin that its comedy by and large vanishes, thereby neutering charming turns from Owen Wilson and Mark Maron, this slog is like a more heartfelt Happy Gilmore if it ran as long as Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander.
Stick‘s premise reads, and plays, like something an AI would spit out after having been fed the plots of every sports film from the 20th century.
Pryce Cahill (Wilson) was known as “Stick” when he was a PGA Tour hotshot, but his career crashed and burned after he melted down during a tournament and, then, punched out his rival Clark Ross (Timothy Olyphant), whose smiling face now mocks him in television commercials for an annual golf event.
Like his beat-up yellow Corvette, Pryce has lost his luster, and he spends his nights hustling barroom dupes out of cash with the aid of his best friend and former caddy Mitts (Maron)—at least, when he’s not getting drunk and high in the ramshackle closet that serves as his de facto trophy room.
Pryce’s fortunes continue to nosedive when his ex-wife Amber-Linn (Judy Greer) informs him that she’s finally selling their house (in which he lives), since despite caring for him, she can’t keep enabling his self-destruction.
Luckily for Pryce, things turn around when, at the club where he works as a salesman and golf pro, he hears the sweetest of swings at the driving range. It belongs to Santi (Peter Dager), a 17-year-old with a stroke that would make Tiger Woods take notice. Santi isn’t a club member (he works at a local grocery store), and Pryce makes it his mission to become the kid’s mentor and get him into the U.S. Amateur Championships.
To do this, Pryce must both convince Santi that he should return to the sport he abruptly quit years earlier thanks to a falling out with his demanding dad, and persuade Santi’s party store-manager mom Elena (Mariana Treviño) that she should let this happen.
Through various machinations, Pryce pulls it off, scrounging up $100,000 to get Elena on board, and enticing Santi with promises of future glory. Thus, a road trip across America begins in the RV that Mitts used to travel in with his now-deceased wife. At an early stop on their journey, they encounter feisty bartender Zero (Lilli Kay), and she immediately hits it off with Santi at precisely the moment the prodigy is on the outs with Pryce.
As a result, Pryce strikes a secret deal with her: in exchange for a hefty payday, she’ll accompany them on their odyssey, providing Santi with the pearls of Pryce wisdom that the kid doesn’t want to hear from the source himself.
Set-ups don’t come more mechanical than this, and that’s without even mentioning that Pryce is still grieving the death of his four-year-old son, and is therefore seeking, like Santi, a surrogate father-son bond. Salvation from past mistakes and trauma are the order of the day, and in such a transparent fashion that it takes all of one contentious scene to establish that Mitts and Elena are destined for amour.
Stick never met a hoary convention it didn’t embrace, and that additionally goes for montages of Santi triumphing on the green and the motley crew having fun on the road and at campsites, the latter of which are frequent destinations since they’re all residing, awkwardly, in the same Winnebago.
Stick is resolutely unoriginal, its every beat so well-known that most viewers will always be three steps ahead of its narrative. More frustrating, however, is the fact that its distention costs it its sharpness. Whereas such material should be snappy and unpredictable, everything here is flabby and obvious, and that unfortunately extends to Pryce.
Wilson can do this shaggy-dog screw-up routine in his sleep, and he’s perfectly likable as the once-promising phenom. But in order for the material to sustain its length (and its dramatic obligations), Keller imagines Pryce as a muted comic character, lacking the out-there zaniness that makes such affairs amusing in the first place. When, in a late episode, Pryce concocts an elaborate hustle to save Santi’s professional prospects, the show temporarily comes alive. Yet too often, he’s just a sad sack who dispenses a few lazy, low-key one-liners.
Maron is similarly hamstrung by Mitts’ grief, which manifests itself via angry outbursts, and though Treviño and Dager do fine work, they’re given little by scripts that want to keep things aww-shucks sweet rather than outrageously silly.
Kay’s Zero, meanwhile, is a self-described “gender queer anti-capitalist post-colonial feminist” who routinely talks about things like “grind culture” and “late-stage capitalist ideology,” and if that makes her sound like a drag, that seems to be intentional.
In a show clearly aimed at Gen-Z and older audiences—as evidenced by references to Pretty Woman, The Hurt Locker, Thelma and Louise, Turner and Hooch, and Fight Club, and soundtrack tunes such as T. Rex’s “20thCentury Toy,” The Knack’s “My Sharona,” and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Cecilia”—Zero has been designed as the aggravating mouthpiece for self-important Gen-Z progressive ideas and jargon. While she successfully elicits eyerolls (including from Maron’s Mitts), that doesn’t make her funny—it makes her a grating device.
Stick‘s late crisis comes across as minor and, consequently, its characters’ reactions resonate as totally overblown. Yet because the series is following a tried-and-true template, it simply assumes that the particulars don’t really matter. Alas, they do, and the proceedings’ lack of attention to them is its ultimate undoing.
Be it a sappy what-if fantasy sequence about the parenthood Pryce lost, or Elena’s helium-related entrepreneurial dreams, a surplus of tepid and sappy padding crushes any glimmers of goofiness, which is precisely what such a misfits-make-good saga demands—and which might have made this, if not a hole in one, at least a shot onto the fairway rather than into the rough.
