A film for those who observe the religion of baseball

Rating: 6/10 (5 July 2008)

The best way to describe "Bull Durham" is a pitch that starts as a fastball and then breaks out of the zone--how far out just depends on how long your bat is. The analogy might seem a bit much, but this sports comedy stars with a very catchy, natural humor about it, but it loses some velocity later on when it starts playing off as a romance drama. Whether the romance subplot works for you is obviously a matter of opinion, but it definitely threw me off.
I really liked this film to start. Kevin Costner doesn't come off as a typical hotshot ballplayer- -that's not his role at all. He's quite good as a seasoned minor league veteran with an interesting perspective on the game. Susan Sarandon is also a really unique character in a sex-crazed older woman with a devout passion for baseball. Their characters make you think about the game differently and for a fan of the game, you have to like or at least find interesting what they have to say. Ron Shelton, well-accomplished writer/director of sports films from the late 80's-early 90s does a good job making this film much less formulaic. Gladly, there is not way too much focus on the game being shown on screen--there's just enough to make it a true baseball movie, but the movie revolves around the way baseball affects people, particularly those who love it but never saw any good come of it.
In the film, Costner is Crash Davis, a minor league vet who is brought in to play catcher for the Durham Bulls to mentor their pitching prospect, "Nuke" LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) who has a "million dollar arm and a five cent head." The relationship between the two is humorous and eventually becomes serious after awhile as the film takes its turn for the dramatic.
While I didn't particularly care for the film's portrayal of its female characters, Sarandon did make the film a bit more interesting than just a generic love interest because she's so fixed on baseball and strange things like romantic era poetry.
This is not really a true comedy, and perhaps the slight dislike I have with the film is because of that expectation, but it's mostly the ineffective romance stuff. It's kind of overdone with all the saxophone music and other 80s stuff that happens toward the end.
The best part of the film though is that unique dialogue about baseball. Costner has some killer lines and a fan of the game really starts to think about it differently which is a very cool aspect of this movie. By the end with the romance and all, I just wasn't totally sold on "Bull Durham to consider it a really good film. Instead it was decent, but something I'd still recommend, mostly to a sports fan.