Overlong and poorly written

Rating: Null/10 (28 September 1999)

This film has three massive strikes against it - its length, its confusing flashback structure and its abysmal character development. For non-Americans like me, there is the fourth strike of its cultural parochialism. This is one basketball movie which will leave non-enthusiasts completely cold, unlike the superb "Bull Durham", which provided ample enjoyment even for people who cared nothing about the game. But then "Bull Durham" had a much shorter running time (105 versus 137 minutes), a razor sharp script, a straightforward linear structure and understandable, if sometimes caricatured, characters. Both films enjoyed good performances from very appealing actors, though you have to admit that Kelly Preston cannot hold a candle to the superb Susan Sarandon.
The ponderous buildup towards the inevitable happy endings, both romantic and sporting, seems to take forever. Because it is a "serious" film, these happy endings look doubly forced and unlikely - an aging, injured player achieves a perfect day's pitching against top-notch Major League opponents and an aging philanderer declares true love to a woman who knows he has cheated on her. The corresponding double happy ending in "Bull Durham", even though it is a superbly tongue-in-cheek comedy, looks that much less unlikely and more realistic. A ten years younger Costner hits a record score in MINOR League before retiring gracefully, and he and the gleefully promiscuous Sarandon character establish a tentative relationship, in which neither has any confidence of a lifetime's endurance.
The unlikely behavior of the leading players is continued in the treatment of Preston's daughter - whose very existence is not mentioned until deep into the film. The delightful and talented Jena Malone is provided with the feeblest of excuses for running away from her devoted mother to her uncaring dopehead dad. Her character's limited presence is a mere sideshow to the main story and she could usefully have been deleted altogether to shorten the excessive running time. Other characters are present for some limited, much needed comic relief, or to provide background to the aging god struggling to achieve a dignified and long overdue exit from the game.
The countless flashbacks confuse both story and character development - most of the time you have little sense of when they occurred relative to the present, there is very little sense of what happened between these episodes and there is even less sense of the leading characters' motivations - e.g. why Preston's character hangs onto this Lothario or how deeply the Costner character feels about her from episode to episode.
Thankfully, the disastrous box office should kill any hope of a sequel, and Kevin may be forced to act his advancing age and seek more appropriate roles and better written scripts.