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Does the Disney+ Docudrama Rise Reach Giannis-Level Heights?

Ral Agada as Thanasis and Uche Agada as Giannis in Disney's live-action RISE, exclusively on Disney+. Photo courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc. © 2022 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

The Disney+ streaming service’s new docudrama Rise aims to reach the heights of its subject, Milwaukee Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo. That’s a pretty tall task, given the player is a two-time NBA Most Valuable Player, 2019-20 Defensive Player of the Year, and as of last year, an NBA Champion. But the family-friendly Rise is up to the challenge, focusing on the tight-knit Antetokounmpo clan’s remarkable journey from Nigeria to Greece to the U.S.A. and the highest peaks of professional basketball.

For evidence of the astounding heights Giannis Antetokounmpo can reach, check out his astonishing block on Deandre Ayton in Game 4 of the 2021 NBA Finals. With the Bucks trailing the Suns two games to one, Antekounmpo’s team desperately needed a win over the visiting Phoenix Suns. The Bucks held a slim two-point lead with 1:28 to go. With Giannis double-teaming prolific-scoring Devin Booker, the Suns guard pulled up near the free throw line, held the ball in his right hand, and deftly lofted a delicate no-look alley-oop to the unguarded Ayton, who was racing down the left lane for what looked to be a certain game-tying dunk.

Somehow, Giannis read the play, took a single power step, and leaped 180 degrees to rise far above the rim and cleanly block Ayton’s sure-fire dunk attempt, denying the Suns their only chance to tie the game and sending the Milwaukee crowd–and the Twitterverse—into a frenzy. For some it was the greatest block they’d ever seen. Giannis led the Bucks to victory in Game 4, then Games 5 and 6, earning his first NBA Championship as well as the Finals Most Valuable Player award.

The block not only turned the tide in the NBA Finals, but showed, in a matter of seconds, the heights to which the two-time league MVP could rise. And Giannis’s is a remarkable story of rising above poverty and discrimination to the very top of one’s profession, along with his big brother and Bucks teammate Thanasis and the rest of the Antetokounmpo family. It’s that story—the emigration from Nigeria to Greece—on which Rise adroitly focuses, something of a miracle in itself and perfectly suited to Disney+’s family-friendly format.

Rise begins before Giannis’s birth as Charles and Vera Antetokounmpo (Dayo Okeniyi and Yetide Badaki, respectively) emigrate from Nigeria to Greece, where Giannis was born in 1994 and where the new parents struggled to survive and provide for him and their other four children, including his older brother Thanasis, with the firstborn son Francis left behind in Nigeria. Living under the daily threat of deportation, Charles and Vera desperately sought Greek citizenship, but could not earn a permanent visa without permanent employment—and could not earn permanent employment without a work visa.

The family’s life in Greece, where they and the boys earned a living by hawking watches, handbags, and sunglasses to tourists on the streets of Athens, is presented here in bright, sunny colors and high key lighting, as the family’s tight bonds and work ethic are highlighted. Charles, formerly a high-level footballer, teaches his sons the sport when not struggling with one temporary job after another. This version of the Antetokounmpo family’s rise from poverty looks and feels more than a little Disneyfied, with paternal love and familial bonding at the forefront and the ongoing threat of deportation present but subdued. Nonetheless, the family’s plight as undocumented workers in Greece for the first 18 years of Giannis’s life is told with empathy as the brothers encounter racism and hatred in their adopted homeland.

Yetide Badaki as Vera, Ral Agada as Thanasis, Elijah Sholanke as Alexandros, Uche Agada as Giannis, Dayo Okeniyi as Charles, and Jaden Osimuwa as Kostas, standing together on a basketball court.
Yetide Badaki as Vera, Ral Agada as Thanasis, Elijah Sholanke as Alexandros, Uche Agada as Giannis, Dayo Okeniyi as Charles, and Jaden Osimuwa as Kostas in RISE, exclusively on Disney+. Photo by Patrick Redmond. © 2021 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

Remarkably, Giannis (Uche Agada) and Thanasis (Ral Agada) did not touch a basketball until their teenage years, daring to leave home for the opportunity to join a local youth camp. Though both are tall, neither shows immediate aptitude for the sport. And the family was so poor that for a time the two had to share a single pair of basketball shoes, alternating their court time. Only with considerable effort on court, first with a youth team, then a club, then in a semipro league, did the two develop as athletes. At first, older brother Thanasis seems the greater talent of the two, but ultimately it was Giannis who, with the help of friendly talent agent, Kevin Stefanides (Manish Dayal) entered the NBA Draft in 2013. And even that was at the risk of the family’s undocumented status being outed.

To summarize the Antetokounmpo saga in a few short paragraphs is to do it a mild injustice, as their rise from poverty and discrimination as undocumented citizens to a family with a roster of three NBA players (including younger brother Kostas, who played for the 2020 NBA Champion Los Angeles Lakers) is nothing short of astonishing. In a way, their true-life story is tantamount to the fiction told in the recent Adam Sandler film Hustle, where Sandler’s character is a talent scout for the Philadelphia 76ers hoping to find that diamond of a prospect whose ability will change the course of his team’s destiny and his family’s lives. Except that Rise is no fiction—and if anything, likely a slightly sanitized, family-friendly version of the Antekounmpos’ real-life journey.

Writer Arash Amel and Nigerian director Akin Omotoso keep family first in this telling, with the boys’ mild acts of purposeful disobedience and occasional encounters with racist opponents and immigration police secondary to the family’s strong bonds of togetherness. At times, the film will fall into a predictable pattern of a few lines of expository dialogue interrupted by a longer montage of basketball or other sequences set to music. Were it not for the delightful score by Ré Olunuga, which hybridizes classic orchestral Disneyesque orchestral music with more traditionally African rhythms and instruments, and two songs—“Rise” and “Obago”—-co-written and performed by the eldest Antetokounmpo brother, Francis (who goes by the stage name “Ofili”), those scenes might feel rote but here exhibit a freshness and zeal.

Ral Agada as Thanasis and Uche Agada as Giannis
Ral Agada as Thanasis and Uche Agada as Giannis in Rise, exclusively on Disney+. Photo by Patrick Redmond.. Photo courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc. © 2022 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

The film’s success owes a great deal to the successful casting of the two young men who play Thanasis and Giannis, respectively. How many casting calls go out for a young Nigerian man standing well over six feet tall who can not only act but hoop? Uche Agada, a young actor from New Jersey whose father is Nigerian, earned the role of Giannis over 400 competitors. Uche not only exhibits the calm tenacity and problem-solving mentality of Giannis—but he also had an older brother, Ral Agada, whom the producers ultimately cast in the role of older brother Thanasis. Both newcomers are perfectly convincing if not seasoned pros like Dayo Okeniyi and Yetide Badaki, who are excellent as parents Charles and Vera, careful stewards of their sons’ well-being.

Disney is all about family, and Rise—a true story told in typical Disney fashion as docudrama—does not disappoint in chronicling the remarkable story of Giannis Antetokounmpo and his family. Their experience represents the very strength of the human spirit in overcoming obstacles, and in this era provides a welcome antidote to anti-immigrant rhetoric and ongoing racism. It does not hurt to be a fan of Giannis or his team to appreciate Rise, but anyone even casually interested in sport more generally will likely find themselves moved by its true tale of trial and triumph.

Written by J Paul Johnson

J Paul Johnson is Publisher of Film Obsessive. A professor emeritus of film studies and an avid cinephile, collector, and curator, his interests range from classical Hollywood melodrama and genre films to world and independent cinemas and documentary.

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