Starring Kyrie Irving. Rated PG

Australian-born Kyrie Irving spent much of this decade as a point guard for the Cleveland Cavaliers (now he’s with the Boston Celtics), and was an Olympic gold medallist two years ago. In 2012, he took time out to don a white wig and aging makeup for an amusing series of Pepsi Max spots in which he played a Harlem old-timer hustling “young bloods” on the basketball court.

NBA greats like Bill Russell popped up in the ads, Irving proved to be a talented improviser, and you can see why the marketing folks at not-Coke thought they had something worth expanding. Even so, to call this feature-length spinoff familiar is an understatement. Indeed, Uncle Drew writer Jay Longino told Variety that the film’s initial pitch was based on The Blues Brothers and other let’s-get-the-old-gang-together flicks.

Its director, Charles Stone III, also borrowed elements from his earlier efforts Drumline (cocky musical upstart learns to respect tradition) and Mr. 3000 (cocky old-timer is forced to regain his crown) to make a surprisingly sluggish movie that spends more than an hour of its 90 minutes doing Barbershop-ish setups for a payoff that feels rushed and incidental to an oddly underpopulated comedy more sentimental than energetic.

There are some mild laughs, mostly coming from Lil Rel Howery—the resourceful TSA buddy in Jordan Peele’s Get Out, referenced here—as Dax, a would-be sports impresario and Foot Locker employee haunted by his own B-ball failure at the hands of a local “Macklemore-looking dude” (Nick Kroll) who stole his ball and more. (Remarkably, the film’s Pepsi placements are few, but Kroll makes a funny shout-out to “Aleve, the number one pain reliever in the game!”.)

When Dax loses a new team to his rival, a chance encounter with Irving’s Uncle Drew (now in makeup that’s less convincing than what was in the ads) has him rounding up the cranky baller’s teammates from back in the day, just in time to enter a big contest Dax has spent his life savings on. These include Shaquille O’Neal, Nate Robinson, Reggie Miller, and Chris Webber as gents who are not only old but blind, wheelchair-bound, mute, and filled with anger.

One, happily, has a beautiful granddaughter (Erica Ash) for Dax to bond with, but nothing really comes of that de rigueur plot point. Tiffany Haddish appears briefly as his trashy, gold-digging girlfriend. When she sees the finished film, she may regret not having worn a disguise.