To Me, This Totally Missed The Mark

Rating: 3/10 (24 February 2013)

I came away from this thinking that so much more could have been done with it. There was a potentially powerful story here about the troubled relationship between a father and daughter and their attempt to reconnect. The father and daughter were played by actors for whom I have a very high regard - the veteran Clint Eastwood, and I've been enchanted with Amy Adams ever since I saw her in "Enchanted." And they were both very good in their roles - Eastwood as the dad, an aging baseball scout with failing vision who's nearing the end of the road and Adams as his daughter, who's on the fast track to becoming a partner with a major law firm. The story has Gus (Eastwood) being sent to scout a high school baseball phenom and Mickey (Adams) going with him to help him out. Theirs is a distant and troubled relationship. The question is "why?" And the problem is that not enough focus is put on the relationship and its history and on their reconciliation. Other than portraying their distance from each other, maybe 10 minutes of the movie explores the background of the relationship. That was a missed opportunity. It could have been a powerful story, except that the writers clearly aren't satisfied with this being an emotional roller coaster of a ride through a troubled father-daughter relationship, and they want us to think of this as a baseball movie. And that was a problem.
Gus was a scout. I get that. But the behind the scenes machinations going on in the Atlanta Braves organization (supposedly) didn't strike me as believable. If you want to see behind the scenes baseball portrayed, watch "Moneyball." It does a much better job of that. Then there was the high school baseball phenom Bo Gentry (played by Joe Massingill.) As far as I was concerned, he should have been no more than a minor backdrop. The only thing relevant about the character was that Gus - for all the limitations age had brought on - was still able to scout him properly. He couldn't hit a curve ball. Aside from that he really didn't matter to the story, so why keep going back to him? I didn't care at all that he was an arrogant, obnoxious, self absorbed jerk. I don't know why that had to be stressed as much as it was. I don't know why there was a need to have the young Red Sox scout thrown into the picture. OK. I do know. For whatever reason, there needed to be a potential romance for Mickey. Why did there need to be a potential romance for Mickey? I really don't know, except that Amy Adams is cute, and I guess Hollywood figures that a character played by someone as cute as Amy Adams needs a romance. But I really didn't care about her relationship with Johnny (Justin Timberlake.) Adams' time would have been better spent in more powerful scenes with Eastwood than in fluff stuff with Timberlake. And the closing scenes where Mickey brings in a curve ball throwing phenom (Jay Galloway) she's discovered and gets him a tryout with the Braves, setting him up against Gentry in a workout struck me as just plain dumb.
There was some potentially good material in this, and there were two great actors who could have done a lot if that potential had been used. Unfortunately it wasn't, and the whole movie suffered as a result, becoming bogged down in too much baseball at the expense of where the real meat of the story was. (3/10)