Here’s a question for the makers of “The Underdoggs,” about a first-class jerk of an ex-NFL player played by rapper Snoop Dogg who takes over a ragtag youth football team as part of a community service sentence: Who was this movie made for?

It certainly can’t be for children and families, normally the target for “inspiring” sports stories about kids who learn to work together toward a common goal (think Disney’s 1992 classic “The Mighty Ducks,” the “Citizen Kane” of such films). “The Underdoggs” is filled wall-to-wall with f-bombs and the n-word, hardly an example for impressionable youth.

Even Amazon MGM Studios, the film’s distributor, didn’t know what to do with it. The film, produced by its star and directed by Charles Stone III (2002’s “Drumline”), was originally scheduled for a theatrical release in October, then got pushed to Friday, Jan. 26. The studio then decided to forgo theaters altogether, dumping it onto Prime Video.

It’s a project best forgotten. Snoop Dogg plays former Oakland NFL star Jaycen “Two J’s” Jennings, an egotistical diva during his playing days and even more insufferable as a retired player with a podcast. His agent is played by Kal Penn, in a two-scene cameo that looks like it took about 20 minutes to shoot.

After he crashes his luxury sports car into a city bus, J.J. is sentenced to community service and winds up coaching a youth football team in Long Beach. Along the way, he reconnects with his ne’er-do-well boyhood friend (Mike Epps of the Oakland-set “I’m a Virgo”), his old high-school coach (George Lopez) and an old squeeze (Tika Sumpter), a single mother whose son (Jonigan Booth) plays for the team.

There is a precedent for foulmouthed coaches taking over a youth sports team. “The Bad News Bears” (1976) is a classic, with curmudgeonly drunk Walter Matthau forced into coaching a baseball team led by Tatum O’Neal and Jackie Earle Haley (it was remade in 2005).

But the occasional profanity in that film belied a soft heart at the center. Nothing like the hate fest brewing in “The Underdoggs.”

What’s sad is the film could have been something nice, because it started from something nice.

Snoop Dogg, born Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr., was raised in Long Beach and has been a longtime football fan. As the film notes just before the end credits roll, he founded the Snoop Youth Football League in 2005 for children “regardless of race, color, creed, or economic background.” Some 85,000 have participated.

Snoop has obviously made a real-life impact in his community. Too bad he couldn’t make one in reel life as well. 

Reach G. Allen Johnson: ajohnson@sfchronicle.com