If I tell you that "Celtic Pride" is a Hollywood movie revolving around two guys who kidnap a third guy, I've pretty much given away the ending. In this case Mike O'Hara (Daniel Stern) and Jimmy Flaherty (Dan Aykroyd) kidnap Lewis Scott (Damon Wayans) just prior to the last game of the NBA finals in hopes of preventing Scott's Utah Jazz from beating Mike and Jimmy's beloved Boston Celtics.

The two-guys-kidnapping-a-third-guy storyline is known on the Hollywood assembly lines as "Plot 9A." It's a variation upon the standard story of two people (or, in certain bold cases, one person) doing something mean or underhanded to an innocent individual. Plot 9A always has the same ending: All parties eventually come to empathize with each other and end up having a sleep-over where they laugh and cry and beat drums and share smores and find out they're really not all that different after all. It doesn't matter whether Mike and Jimmy disembowel Lewis or barbecue his favorite pet -- you can bet the farm that the inevitable "bond of friendship" will form at the end, because if it didn't, some in the audience might start thinking that crimes had consequences.

This is the first of at least three basketball movies coming out in the summer of 1996 ("Sunset Park" and "Eddie" are the other two). Let's hope the basketball in those films is a little more exciting and realistic than this one. Just because Damon Wayans is black and bald doesn't mean he can play ball. In "Celtic Pride" he barely looks tall enough to dunk an apple in a toilet.