Surprised by the reasonably high score

Rating: 3/10 (1 March 2015)

I am surprised by the pretty high score that "The Million Dollar Arm" has gotten.
Yes, I know that it's based on a true story, but that doesn't mean that it has to be so bland and disconnected. Setting aside that Jon Hamm's character (the agent) was so remarkably unlikable, the movie, AS A MOVIE, is a big disappointment.
After a cute scene of the kids encountering their first elevator, there are almost no scenes where we see someone actually doing something -- we just get oral summaries of the latest incident from one of the characters, e.g., the agent's tenant, or his secretary, etc. This is story-telling as a bunch of news- clippings, not as a MOVIE.
About the only acting pizazz comes from the tenant, who keeps reminding the agent to show some humanity, and from Alan Arkin, but he wanders in and out of the movie like a sort of fairy godmother, come to occasionally refocus the agent on the job at hand.
This could have been a FAR better movie. As it stands, it played like a dry newspaper story. Truth is, I learned more about the two kids from their respective Wikipedia articles.