In a sentence: Keanu Reeves has to coach an inner city Little League team.
There is a singular sin that torments all bad sports movies, and even a few good ones: an unwillingness to let the movie be about the sport.
This sin manifests in ways both mortal and venial. The venial is the obligatory romantic subplot. The broken man hits bottom and finds himself on (or around) some pathetic team, and then around (and eventually on) some lady with a way better grip on life. This woman is always pretty but never ostentatious. She is perceptive and skeptical. She intuitively senses that he is incomplete, mid-transition from caring about shallow things into caring about the things that really matter. She's a teacher, like, half the time. She is Diane Lane, literally in this case, and spiritually in most other cases. In sports movies, you do not "get the girl," you win over the woman.
You win her over because she's the yogi of getting your life together. She is the yardstick by which the broken man measures his personal growth, because she cannot commit to him until he "gets it," until he fully integrates himself into the sport and the people playing it. Only then can she swipe right, her love acting as a reward for (and confirmation of) his self-actualization as both teammate and human being.
In a vacuum, this isn't terrible. Being a good teammate is a pretty good metaphor for being a good partner. Hell, not even a metaphor: among the things you might use to evaluate someone's long-term romantic suitability, I'd put "functions well in team sports" above the proverbial "is nice to waiters." But the idea's as well-worn as a hand-me-down catcher's mitt, and any time spent on it beyond the minimum feels like runtime padding. To some degree, you simply have to accept this. But you don't have to like it. You don't have to like the condescending nod to the girlfriend and/or non-sports-fan that gets dragged to the film, some pandering romcom-shaped fig leaf to placate the uninterested. Ideally it's funny, well-written...and short.
This is one area where I'll give
Hardball a little credit: it doesn't spend more than the usual amount of time on this subplot. Unfortunately, the reason it doesn't spend a lot of time on it is because it spends an incredible amount of time on the
other non-baseball subplot.
It hardly matters what this non-baseball subplot is, because they're interchangeable. Bad and mediocre sports movies are a game of Mad Libs:
player/coach/manager who has suffered
addiction/professional disgrace/a breakup finds renewed purpose
playing/coaching/managing a
baseball/football/curling team.
This time, the second value resolves to "addiction." Specifically, gambling addiction. The really funny thing is that even though he's a gambling addict, and even though he's betting on sports, they have him bet on...basketball. Not even baseball. And as far as I can remember, they don't even do the inverted thing, where he doesn't bet on baseball because he doesn't know anything about it, making his position as Little League coach all the more ridiculous. Nope. They just have him betting on basketball a lot. In a baseball movie.
Except, maybe it's really a gambling movie. Because my God, do we spend a lot of time on the gambling.
Hardball is constantly showing us Reeves' character talking to some burly man who insists he'd better Have the Money, to which he says yes, I will Have the Money.
Let me be clear: it is not bad that the protagonist in a sports film is broken. They have to be. Their growing appreciation of the sport and its participants has to fix something. But the focus should be on the transition. If your character is an alcoholic (like in
The Mighty Ducks, which is about hockey), you don't need to show this over and over after it's established. At most, you may need a brief relapse, a Campbellian sacrifice about two-thirds of the way through. But when you spend more time on it than necessary, it signals the same thing as dwelling on the romance: that your sports scenes don't have a lot going on, and you're trying to fill time.
Pretty bad. Every ground ball involves a fielder diving headfirst and missing it, and we get maybe five or six separate instances of players sliding into a base safely for no real reason. We also have half a dozen cutaways to the scoreboard at weird angles that are strangely hard to read. We have multiple examples of Reeves telling the kids what the score and game situation are to make sure the audience is up to speed.
Obviously the quality of play shouldn't be high, because this is Little League, but if you're depicting sports in a film it's incumbent on you to tie the events to character arcs and/or find creative solutions to the players' foibles. You know what I'm talking about
: the heavy kid is slow, but he hits for power! This kid can't hit but boy is he fast! This kid is talented but the coach needs to come up with an out-of-the-box solution to help him get over some mental block. And so on.
There is shockingly little of this. Only one real example of this trope shows up, with the pitcher. In a better movie, the team would discover he was actually a great pitcher organically. Maybe he throws to first too hard, or gets frustrated and hurls the ball over the fence, causing everyone to gawk in wonder at his arm strength. Instead, he literally just says "I should be the pitcher." So they let him pitch, and he's great. And that's it.
He does have a quirk, though, and it's kind of the only one in the film: he wears headphones and listens to "Big Poppa" by Notorious B.I.G. on repeat because it helps him pitch. The moment we learn this, the rest is obvious: he'll pitch well, someone else will object (or the headphones will break at some key moment), he'll have a crisis of confidence, and then his teammates'll sing it for him and he'll be great again. All of this happens, because it must. But it kind of works because it's sweet and different.
The only other time the film really charms is when a player, having stormed off in frustration after a loss, sends his younger brother to the coach to "negotiate" an incentives-based returning focusing primarily on pizza. I can assure you that, when I was in Little League, being given more or less money to spend at the concession stand depending on how well we played was, indeed, a huge motivating factor.
The ideal version of a film like this would have three or four times as many players with quirks or skills or foibles, with creative or funny solutions for all. But there's just no time for that here. Because our baseball movie needs more scenes of John Hawkes describing free throws and Diane Lane crossing her arms disapprovingly.
In sports terms: they win. Not just the big game against the rival, but the championship, though we see the latter part in a photo epilogue. Why? Because of all the time we spend on the non-sports ending:
The youngest kid on the team, a kid too young to technically play at all, plays nevertheless, gets the game-winning hit...and then gets shot and dies. I'm serious. The end of the film is that a little kid gets shot and dies. Reeves literally gives a eulogy (though it must be said, a pretty good one, and for some reason I feel like I need to watch and consider every fictional euology, for reasons I may get into another time). This is one of a few facile nods to the inner city setting.
If this sounds like a downer, it is, though they try to mitigate this by giving us the events out of order. We cut from the kid getting ready to hit to his murder, and ther funeral, euology, and end of the game are all interspersed.
This isn't a good movie, or a good baseball movie, but there's an awful lot to be learned from it. It's the kind of genre exercise that should never be watched, only studied.
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