Review: For The Love of The Game

This is a strange movie. While being very well done, it is still a bad movie.

The film follows the final game of baseball legend Billy Chapel’s career. He’s pitching a perfect game on the mound while his personal life is falling apart behind the scenes. This is a solid concept for a film and in many places director Sam Raimi (Evil Dead, Army of Darkness, Darkman, Spiderman 1 & 2) manages to keep a good balance between the game and rest of the film. The problem is that everything that is not the game is just “the rest of the film.” If it’s not a part of Chapel’s last game, it stinks.

Raimi is one of the better directors working today and he captures the psychology of Billy Chapel brilliantly through the clever use of sound and imagery. As the film progresses, Raimi masterfully builds the game so you actually do care about its outcome. The scenes in the game make for a very interesting movie.

The problem with this production is the private life of Billy Chapel. Throughout the whole film, Chapel is worried about his disintegrating relationship with his girl Jane. My issue with this part of the film is that Chapel is the only one who worries about it. The relationship with Jane is so melodramatic and divorced from reality; it doesn’t mix with the rest of the movie. To boil it down, it is Costner doing his best to relive his Bull Durham days and Kelly Preston doing an impression of Meg Ryan. All of this while acting from a script from an afternoon soap opera.

The film suffers from this schizophrenic mixture of romance and sports movie. It is certainly possible to combine the two, Bull Durham did with great success, but it had the sense not to take itself so seriously.

Article Author: Nehring

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