Raimi's Return

Rating: Null/10 (20 June 2000)

After `A Simple Plan', many felt it was time to throw in the towel for Sam Raimi. It seemed apparent that the director/genius who brought us `Darkman' and the `Evil Dead' series seemed as though he was trading in his signature B-movie look & feel and abandoning his quest to further blur the lines between the comedy & horror genres for a more `serious' style of film.
As it turns out, nothing could be further from the truth! Raimi is back, and the relieved sighs were heard Â‘round the world from his fans upon release of `For the Love of the Game'. While not quite embracing the B-movie look & feel as he once would have, Raimi has still shown us all that comedy and horror are not the strange bedfellows that some of us have come to expect.
Raimi managed to secure Kevin Costner to play the lead villain in a movie about a falling star. Mere minutes after the film's opening scene, Raimi flashes us back to the day Costner's character and the female lead meet; her car is broken down on the side of the road, and he happens to be driving by in a Porsche. In true Sam Raimi fashion, he shows us how truly evil the villain is right away: Costner stops, approaches the young & seemingly stranded woman, and threatens to make her watch a baseball game. Callous acts like this would normally terrify some viewers, but Kevin Costner's expressionless face make it easy to repeat to oneself that `it's just a movie'.
Later, in an effort to brighten the `creepy' backdrop painted with a constant barrage of baseball images & Kevin Costner's face, Raimi pays homage to two of the greatest films of his career: `Evil Dead 2' and `Army of Darkness'. He does this by having Costner's character injure his pitching hand with a table saw, a moment of sheer comic genius. The excessive use of blood, Costner's inability to make it back to his house (from what appeared to be the garage), and the idea that a major-league pitcher would be careless enough to allow this to happen at all make this one of the funniest moments of the film. For Raimi's die-hard fans, however, this scene carried with it some sentimental value; a reminder of Raimi's glory days, when Bruce Campbell was forced to chop off his possessed hand with a chainsaw and later build a replacement out of armor.
Despite the fact that this movie was considered a disappointment at the box-office, Raimi's return as the king of horror-comedies and Kevin Costner's expressionless, monotonous villainy make this a hands-down winner. I'd recommend this film to anyone who carries even the slightest degree of appreciation for Sam Raimi, and would also recommend it as an excellent introduction to his classic style.