The Rookie Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)April 1st, 2002
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Sports films - if you've seen one, you've seen them all, with very few exceptions. The Rookie, however, is not one of those exceptions. It's a paint-by-numbers, cliché-riddled story that has one thing working in its favor: It's based on stuff that really happened. It's difficult to fault films for being cliché-heavy when they're based in reality, but I have an even tougher time admiring a picture simply because the events it depicts actually took place.
The Rookie is about a guy in his mid-30s named Jim Morris (played by 47-year-old Dennis Quaid, Traffic) who, as you probably already know from the film's revealing trailer, became a major league pitcher after he discovered the injured arm that cost him a shot at the Big Show as a teen was suddenly capable of hurling a baseball 98 miles per hour. Through the picture's tedious and superfluous opening 25 minutes, we learn Jim's dad was a distant, unloving Navy dad (Brian Cox, Super Troopers) who moved the family around too often for his son to establish roots with any one Little League team (the horror!). The family finally settled in Big Lake, Texas, a dusty town in the middle of nowhere that has a proud (and slightly surreal) baseball history but, for whatever reason, opted not to make the sport available to its youth. As the film progresses, we're able to put together the unseen story of Jim's short-lived baseball career, which saw him being drafted by a big league team, immediately blowing his arm out and, finally, settling down to raise a family of his own.
Flash forward several decades, where Jim is now the Big Lake High science teacher and coach of their struggling baseball team that gets little respect and even less funding from the football-crazy school. In an attempt to motivate his ragtag bunch of players, Jim agrees to give professional baseball another shot if they make it to the state playoffs, which, of course, they do. This is where most baseball movies would end, but it constitutes only the first half of The Rookie.
The second half - and this is a two-plus-hour film - shows Jim sacrificing everything to reestablish his pitching career, shocking everyone (himself included) when his fastball is clocked in the high 90s. He works his way through the minor leagues and, in the final reel, becomes a relief pitcher for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Ordinarily, divulging something that happens this late in the film would be considered a spoiler, but this stuff is all right there in the trailer.
There's plenty that doesn't work in The Rookie, with the 129-minute running time coming in at number one. I've seen plenty of films that could have been significantly pared down, but never one that would have been better if somebody simply threw the first reel in the garbage. Rachel Griffiths (Six Feet Under), who plays Jim's devoted wife, gets little to do other than sport a Texas accent that is much less successful and nearly as annoying as her intonation in Blow (in all fairness, though, a native Texan would probably do much worse trying their hand at an Australian accent).
Conversely, there are a few things that do work, and the biggest is probably Quaid's performance. There aren't a lot of guys who could have pulled off a role like this, and since we're tired of seeing Kevin Costner try to do it, Quaid is practically a welcome sight (my high school science teacher got sued for sexual harassment, so maybe anyone else would have seemed acceptable). The film is good at calculatingly pushing your buttons, offering several lump-in-the-throat-inducing scenes, and the audience at my screening really seemed to like Jim's young son Hunter (Angus T. Jones, See Spot Run), though I grew tired of his non-stop mugging (I think he attended The Bill Cosby Academy of Acting). I dug the way The Rookie depicted minor league baseball fans as dolts who are way more into the between-inning gimmicks and giveaways than the game itself. The film is rated G, and it even casts the real Jim Morris as one of the AA umpires.
But here's the biggest thing The Rookie has going for it: Any film that features a middle-aged white guy doing something every other middle-aged white guy has always wished he could do (Lester Burnham, anyone?) is going to be heaped with glowing praise by critics, who are mostly middle-aged white guys. For some reason, baseball seems to bring out the manipulative sentimentalism in filmmakers - also usually middle-aged white guys - who inevitably turn their movie into a gooey love letter addressed to our national pastime. Every time someone makes a new baseball flick, they try to out-mush the previous one (Major League is the rare example). I'm into the sport as much as anyone else, but I took a powder circa The Natural. Other than being based on a true story, The Rookie is no different than 1993's Rookie of the Year with American Pie's Thomas Ian Nichols as a mediocre Little League pitcher who breaks his arm and finds out he can throw 100 miles per hour once the appendage heals. He too makes the improbable jump to the major league, but that film doesn't spread the schmaltz like mustard on a Fenway Frank.
2:09 - G
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