Doesn't quite make my heart sing

Rating: 6/10 (10 May 2012)

Having first seen it many years ago when I recently watched Major League again I found that it did not live up to my memories. Nor did it live up to its reputation. It's not nearly as funny as I seemed to remember it being. And while it it has acquired a reputation for being truly outrageous that's not really an accurate assessment either. Honestly, the movie's kind of tame, it doesn't push the envelope nearly as much as you would think. Now all of this doesn't mean it's a bad movie. And any movie with Charlie Sheen playing a character nicknamed Wild Thing will have an outlandish moment or two. It's just that there aren't enough of those great moments to allow the movie to really be that brilliant, outrageous baseball comedy so many people remember it as being.
The story is your typical sports underdog tale. A bunch of losers band together and prove that maybe they're not really losers after all. There's the requisite villain, in this case the team's evil female owner, who is trying to hold the team down. Obstacles are constantly thrown in the way of our plucky underdogs but they forge on towards the big game at the end which ends all movies of this sort. Along the way there are some laughs and hijinks. Not all the jokes and gags hit their mark but enough do to keep you entertained. There's an unfortunate romantic subplot which is a total dud. All the time spent exploring this relationship between the veteran catcher, played by Tom Berenger, and his old flame, played by Rene Russo, is really time wasted for the movie. We never really get to know Russo's character at all and Berenger's crusty old catcher is much more in his element around his teammates. You know the movie's going to try to pay this storyline off in the end but really who cares? This movie is about the Indians. And there were more than enough personalities in that group of misfits to carry the movie. Sheen, Berenger, Corbin Bernsen, Wesley Snipes, Chelcie Ross and, as the voodoo-loving Pedro Cerrano, Dennis Haysbert. Each of the characters has their moments. Perhaps the best performance of all though comes from James Gammon as the manager, Lou Brown. He gets many of the best lines and the way he delivers them is just perfect. And of course there's also Bob Uecker providing laughs every time he opens his mouth in playing the team's radio announcer. There are a lot of fine performers here and the movie has a lot of good pieces. But there's the sense it doesn't quite all add up. It's not as consistently funny as you'd hope. The whole thing is very predictable which wouldn't be so bad if the movie at least kept you laughing all the way to the ending you know is coming. But the laughs come and go, and when they do come they're generally not as explosive as you'd hope. And there's that romantic storyline which is a complete waste of time and which rears its ugly head again in the end at a time when all the focus clearly should be on the team. Major League is not a bad movie. But is has enough flaws to hold it back from true greatness.