For Love Of The Cliché

Rating: 9/10 (14 August 2005)

Kevin Costner brings the armchair sports fantasy to life yet again in this movie, only this time, unlike "Tin Cup," he plays a has-been rather than a never-was athlete. One gets the impression that Costner is exorcising his demons by repeatedly injecting himself into sports heroism roles that he certainly never played in real life. Despite this, the movie somehow manages to work brilliantly even when the entire cast (save for Vin Scully) did not.
On the last day of the season, Billy Chapel was having a bad day: he had a fight with his girlfriend (Kelly Preston) the night before, leading to a breakup, he's on the verge of retirement, a shadow of his former self, and to top it off, he's a half-hour late to the ballpark, where he proceeds to have a midlife crisis. We get to experience this crisis juxtaposed over the perfect game Chapel begins tossing, as the action shifts back and forth from the game to the flashbacks of his great yet still somehow unfulfilling life. If Chapel were 18 and female, he would have been a good candidate for the show "Starting Over." In this film, however, he's stuck on the mound.
As Chapel goes over the past five years of his life with Jane, and her daughter (played by the overrated Jena Malone -- an award nomination? get real!), and as we are tortured with Kelly Preston's impersonation of a leading lady, no one seems to notice just how well he's pitching until he asks late in the game "Has anyone been on base?" The visuals are excellent, as we see him enter "The Zone" by tuning everything out, and only announcer Vin Scully (who does not do east coast games in real life) seems to pick up on what is going on.
We learn that Chapel has come back from a horrific hand injury that should have been his ticket into retirement, and that he's still got a few -- if only a few -- good pitches left in him, but we also learn that he is playing the role of spoiler, doing his job to make it as difficult as possible for the hated Yankees (replete with stereotypical Yankee fans that remind me of those I've seen at the games) to make the playoffs.
The final few innings of the game are the heart of the plot: will he complete the "perfecto?" Will Jane turn around and come home? Will his hand injury obstruct his destiny? The most compelling message of the film is that we often meet one destiny while on the path towards another. There are no great moral messages, just a man trying to leave one last mark on the game, hoping for a "last hurrah" that rivals the three home runs (of six that year) which Babe Ruth hit on May 25, 1935, at the age of forty.
Despite one of the worst casting jobs of all time, I still recommend this movie, which while clichéd, still manages a few original twists and makes for an entertaining respite.