A two-hour cheesy experience that turns into a giant Cheese Cake

Rating: 5/10 (23 April 2013)

I've been a movie-goer since I was a tiny baby, and I honestly believe that this is the cheesiest cheese ball of a movie that I have ever seen in my entire movie-going life. The cheesiness starts right at the very beginning, with Harrison Ford (as Branch Rickey) saying something like this: "I'm old, and I'm bored, so I'm gonna do something different. Fellows, I'm gonna bring a Negro to baseball!", followed by an overly-shocked co-worker's line "Sorry sir, but HAVE YOU LOST YOUR FREAKIN MIND?!".
The crowd laughs, and from then on, this cheese-ball of a movie rolls and rolls and turns into this gigantic goo of organic mozzarella cheese cake.
There are two things that "42" tries extremely hard to do. The first is to be "just another sports movie", and the second is to make the audience recognize the nowhere near subtle message of "PEOPLE WERE SO RACIST BACK THEN! LOOK AT ALL THIS RACISM! OH GOD THAT WAS SO RACIST!", and oh my lord does it nail BOTH very well.
I'm not sure if screenplay writer Brian Helgeland took his script and dipped it in a giant pot of organic cheese, or if he, instead, decided to empty a 600 Litre bottle of cheese syrup on his script. Either way, "42" ends up being an uninspired, clichéd, formulaic, and predictable biopic. In fact, it is clichéd and cheesy to a laughable degree. Everything from the dialogue, the one liners, the "inspirational" music that sometimes starts a minute or two before the actual "inspirational" speech, it's all there.
"42" never loses its "TV movie" feel. While "Field of Dreams" was a classic baseball movie, "42" is the equivalent of an over-budget exclusive one-time NBC showing that unfortunately got the 6am time-slot.
The movie is even more disappointing when you take into account the exceptional performances and cinematography. The talent is definitely there, but the execution falls short.
It never tries to be something more than "another sports movie". There is so much focus on the message, "LOOK AT ALL THIS RACISM!" and the LEGEND of Jackie Robinson, and not enough of on Jackie Robinson himself. A grittier approach may have been preferable (which is actually what the trailer showed), but instead we got a forgettable sports movie with a writer that was stuck in the 80s.
The end result is a movie that rolls done a 500 mile cheesy hill that turns into one, clichéd, uninspired, formulaic, enormously over-sized two hour movie that swims across a 50 yard organic cheese cake factory and rolls right out, turning into a giant cheese cake served on a fake silver platter.