With a crack of the old hickory it’s Burl, here to review a
baseball picture! Now, ol’ Burl enjoys baseball, playing it and spectating it
both! I’ve never had a particular love of baseball movies though, but I suspect
that’s because I haven’t seen very many of the good ones! The Natural, Eight Men Out
and even Bull Durham are all on deck,
but I’ve yet to watch any of them! (Ha ha, I have seen Fear Strikes Out, though, and of course The Bad News Bears, which is the best of them I think!)
Today’s baseball picture, Summer Catch, is not one
of the good ones, I’m sorry to say! It’s a simple baseball romance, featuring a
working-class kid who gets his big chance to play for real, his af*air with a
rich girl, the girl’s disapproving dad, the goofy guys who make up the rest of
the team, the local friends, the blue-collar dad and of course the grumpy
coach! It’s all there, present and accounted for, and if you’ve ever seen not
just a sports movie, not just a romance, but any movie of any description,
you’ll have seen all this before! Ha ha!
You might be wondering why ol’ Burl even took this one off
the shelf, much less took the time to watch it! I’m wondering the same,
frankly, but one critical factor was that the movie is set on Cape Cod, a
fishy-smelling place I’m fond of! I’ve always loved seeing it portrayed on
film, which is probably mostly thanks to Jaws
and also maybe a bit to Tough Guys Don’t
Dance! Anyway, I was hoping for some Cape Cod atmosphere here, some scrubby
dunes, half-buried sand fences, clapboard Colonial architecture and so forth!
But no, I didn’t get it!
I also enjoy the summerlong microgenre! This refers to a
movie which takes place over the course of a whole summer: personal growth,
lessons learned, so forth! Summer of ’42
is a summerlong picture; so are Summer Rental, Summer School, One Crazy Summer and Dirty Dancing! Ha ha, and there are plenty
more of them too! I got a bit of satisfaction in that department with this
movie, so huzzah!
The picture tries to be a comedy, and it has a couple of
laughs, but none of them very fulsome! Freddie Prinze Jr. and Matthew “The Descendants” Lillard, who would
reteam later for those Scooby-Doo
pictures (Fred and Shaggy, respectively) do their best, but only Lilliard has
the energy required! Jessica Biel plays the ladyfriend, and I’m afraid I can’t
go to bat for her talents, ha ha! There’s a rather stunning lack of chemistry
between these two lovers, in fact, and their dumbbell dialogue improves things
not a whit!
On the more positive side, there are a few welcome faces in
the supporting cast, though they’re largely wasted! Brian “Best Seller” Dennehy plays the grumping, harrumphing coach; Willard
himself, Bruce “Lies” Davison, is the
rich dad; and Fred Ward, so marvelous in UFOria,
is the not-so-rich dad! There are also late-film cameos from Beverly “Vacation” D’Angelo and John C. McGinley,
as well as appearances from the likes of Hank Aaron, Ken Griffey Jr. and the
Voice of the Red Sox himself, Curt Gowdy! Ha ha!
But
none of this can save the movie from being a stinkpile, I’m very sorry to say!
There’s a reasonable authenticity to the baseball scenes, but not much bullpen
atmosphere beyond that; there’s no spark to the romance, no bite to the drama,
no pep to the comedy (fat girl jokes make up its dispiriting centerpiece) and no
sense that anyone involved in the picture really believed it was a story that
needed to be told (again)! On top of all that it was a disappointment in the
Cape Cod department! I give Summer Catch
one half of a dumb, pointless audio flashback!
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