"I ain't no brainiac!" snaps Akeelah (Palmer) after being picked on by a pair of straight-A under-achievers in her south LA schoolyard. Because she's clever and she can spell, she must be a freak.
But while she's desperate to maintain a low profile, Principal Welch (Armstrong, himself a freak in Revenge Of The Nerds) is desperate for some good press.
Before you can define 'skulduggery', he organises a spelling bee and invites former prodigy Professor Larabee (Fishburne - part Morpheus, part Mr Miyagi) to watch.
Akeelah duly wins and the school has its first representative at the regional finals.
Like Rocky coming out of dictionary corner, her path to glory is strewn with both brickbats and bouquets. Larabee grudgingly agrees to be her mentor, but her widowed mother (Bassett) is too distracted by Akeelah’s bad-boy brother to pay her much heed.
And while she has a new friend in fellow competitor Javier, she makes an enemy of etymological genius Dylan Chiu (Sean Michael)...
or more specifically his father, who makes Kim Jong-Il look like Santa Claus.
Akeelah bids for the national championship with the whole neighbourhood behind her. Even LA's fluffiest gangstas give her ammunition for pronunciation.
The first feature bearing the Starbucks Entertainment logo shows admirable restraint in not plunging the audience into product-placement hell. With nary a coffee cup in sight, the most heavily plugged brand is Scrabble.
The drama has a decaffeinated, family-friendly taste but it's not too frothy and not as predictable as one might think. That said, a shot of espresso would go down well during the draggy middle section.
The show belongs to the ever-engaging Palmer, but Fishburne and Bassett provide much-needed weight, co-starring for the first time since playing Ike and Tina Turner in What's Love Got To Do With It.
Fishburne also produces, so it is probably no coincidence that one contestant stumbles on the word 'merovingian', being the name of a key character from The Matrix. How eminently surreptitious.
Elliott Noble
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