For Love of the Lame

Rating: Null/10 (19 June 2000)

Spoilers Ahead:
If I had to choose between watching For Love of the Game or the Postman twice in a row, there would be no contest. At least the Postman had characters you can empathize with and dialogue from this planet. Costner plays a highly-successful 40 year-old pitcher whose team owner tells him his team has been sold and Costner has been traded to the Giants. This first scene is played with intense melancholy, as if the audience is expected to have empathy for him; it's hard to forget the fact that his character is a highly successful lifetime pitcher for a major league baseball team (how much $$ does a lead pitcher make over the years?), and who has had a career most would envy. I wanted to go "AAwwwwwww!" in the theater. I wondered how many single parents on welfare would have felt sorry for the lug. Kevin's 20-something girlfriend dumps him over the phone, but in the next two scenes he befriends another 20-something, an attractive if angry woman whose car won't start on the side of the road, and without saying much more than "aw, shucks- want to go to a baseball game?" has changed her from yelling "go away", to sleeping with him in the next few scenes. She makes a speech about respecting each other's space, then surprises him in his apartment later, only to be surprised to discover he's been sleeping with his personal masseuse (guess when you're the pitcher it comes with the massage), another 20-something perfect 10 who is more attractive than the love interest. I swear, there must be something about turning 40 that turns men into babe magnets among the under-30 crowd. If Costner was portraying a magnetic type of Casanova we could understand, but he is played like a manniquin. Again, Kevin is given a huge closeup in slow motion as we are expected to feel sorry for a millionaire who gets laid every 30 seconds. This would be tolerable if there was a plot, but there isn't one that I can discern and the dialogue is so incredulous you wonder if the writers care if the audience is actually listening. "You want to come to a baseball game? A game. Do-you-want-to-come-to-a-game...with me.", No, I want to throw a baseball at Kevin for saying these lines, and sue the "writer" for mental cruelty.
I don't know what happens after Kevin is sent on an errand to retrieve his girlfriends errant rebellious teenager daughter from a bad party; I walked out at that point. I hear that some baseball actually occurs later in the movie, some well-choreographed scenes in fact. If the movie had started with this and been about this, it would have been an enjoyable, if not deep, movie. As it is, it's completely contrived with random "plot twists" thrown in without rhyme or reason; Two more relevant titles for this movie would be "For the Love of Money" (explaining why it was made), or "For the Love of Costner". Costner fans won't be dissappointed or care about the plot, as the closeups of Costner are slow and sweet. To us guys, they are slow and sickening. I didn't intend to be this vitriolic about an actor who has done mostly great work. I have to wonder what Costner really thought of it?

No rating - just the most negative review I have written, and that includes Battlefield Earth!