I Really Wanted To Like This Movie, But...

Rating: 4/10 (4 March 2017)

I saw this movie in theaters for two reasons: 1. I'm a huge baseball fan; and 2. I watch Med Men (i.e. the Jon Hamm factor). Even after 20 or so minutes, when I knew exactly what this movie would be, I still really, really wanted to like it. Unfortunately, this one is schmaltzy "Disney" through and through.
For a basic plot summary, "Million Dollar Arm" tells the story of how sports agent J.B. Bernstein (Hamm) starts a competition called Million Dollar Arm in order to find a major league baseball player from the relatively untapped market of India. The two athletes he finds, Rinku (Suraj Sharma) and Dinesh (Madhur Mittal), are in for quite a culture shock as they travel to America for the first time and have to essentially learn baseball from scratch.
First of, let me be clear in that I'm not attaching a star-ranking to the overall story here. It is truly a fascinating and inspiring tale for baseball fans and human-interest fans alike.
As a movie, though, "Million Dollar Arm" falls far short of being great. The main problem? It doesn't have a clear focus, so it tries to do too much and doesn't really nail anything. This could have been a hard-core baseball fan movie. It could have been a love story. It could have been a redemption story. It could have been a new culture assimilation piece. Had the filmmakers looked at the story through just one of those three scopes (and just bolstered it with shades of the others), it would really have worked.
Unfortunately, director Craig Gillespie (or maybe the Disney producers) tries to cram every single theme possible into one movie. It really feels like the old "throw the kitchen sink at 'em" method in terms of trying to evoke every possible emotion from the audience. I realize that this movie is supposed to have a broad, family-based appeal, but but focusing on everything the producers ended up focusing on nothing.
The two biggest wastes in this movie? 1. Hamm, a terrific actor who plays as transparent of a character as one can see on screen; and 2. The fact that hard-core baseball fans like myself will not enjoy the baseball aspects of this movie. It is made for the family set first and foremost.
Thus, though I wanted very badly to enjoy this movie and all the right pieces existed for that to happen, they just didn't come together. The "Indian culture" angle was interesting, but not nearly as compelling as, say, "Slumdog Millionaire", and recently baseball-themed movies like "Trouble with the Curve" and "Moneyball" will appeal much more to the die-hards.