Half of a good movie

Rating: 5/10 (21 January 2007)

It the movie were truly "For Love of the Game," then it would have dispensed with the love story and focused on the baseball, which is the most compelling element. Hollywood, of course, couldn't do that: the demographic appeal is too narrow.
The romance between Billy Chapel (Kevin Costner) and Jane Aubrey (Kelly Preston) is plausible, and the couple's screen chemistry is good. However, it was in these segments that the movie dragged and, while the paradigm -- celebrity ballplayer meets beauty arts writer uninterested in celebrity -- isn't hackneyed, the trajectory of the relationship is. In addition, while Preston does a solid job, the writing for her character is dreadful -- written with a man's sensibilities and emotionally overblown. For her to have a moral crisis on what is a casually-arranged second date makes little sense; it was though she was making the decision of a lifetime rather than merely getting to know someone.
It is in the baseball, the "crossroads of his career" as brilliantly-utilized TV announcer Vin Scully describes it, that makes the plot most interesting. Flashbacks to his baseball past, as well as with the relationship to Jane, are easy to follow and provide context. Much more should have been done here -- maybe to the glory days of his career as well as to his rehabilitation from a career-threatening injury. The baseball scenes were realistic, except for the voiced self-instruction to "Clear the mechanism" to shut out the crowd (such an announcement was not needed; simply fading the noise would have revealed the focus of a pitcher entering "the zone"), and could have been developed on their own.
Even with the relative drag of the romantic sub-plot, the movie has a nice, moderate pace. The melodrama of all the conflicting pressures on Billy is excessive -- facing the potential end of the line and what that represents to him would have been sufficient -- but this is not a poorly crafted film. Quite possibly it all depends on one's perspective: a baseball fan would want more of that, those in need of romance could probably have done without much of the sports.
This is Costner's third baseball-themed movie, and the overall weakest of the trio -- although credit goes to Costner for not reprising one of his previous characters from "Bull Durham" or "Field of Dreams." If anything, this is closer to "The Bodyguard," although superior in terms of believability, acting and pacing.