Million Dollar Arm
Director: Craig Gillespie
Talent: John Hamm, Aasif Mandvi, Alan Arkin, Pitobash
Release Date: 29th August 2014
John Hamm is J.B. Bernstein, a down-on-his-luck sports agent who looks to the amateur cricketers of India for The Next Big Thing in Baseball.
Million Dollar Arm is a film that desperately wants you to believe it has a beating heart beneath its celluloid. It’s a feel-good, rags-to-riches sports story, only without some of the more fun aspects of the genre: there are no real training montages or off-the-field rivalries in this heartfelt dramedy. In fact the sport plays second-string to a love story that ideally would support rather than overshadow the baseball action.
Rinku and Dinesh (the would-be baseball pros) are drawn broadly and aren’t given enough screentime. And despite being the film’s big name draw, Hamm is not well suited to his role: he can play Bad Bernstein but Good Bernstein is beyond him. His face seems incapable of displaying anything approaching happiness: it looks off on him and when the protagonist can’t make you feel good about this feel-good movie, you know something’s amiss. Million Dollar Arm probably won’t be the follow-up to Saving Mr. Banks that Disney hoped it to be, as it doesn’t seem to be interested in coming off the bench and getting in the emotion game.
Words: Luke Maxwell (note: this review was mistakenly credited to Oisín Murphy-Hall in the print edition)
For more film coverage this month, see our reviews of Moebius, The Hundred Foot Journey, The Congress, Into The Storm, Deliver Us From Evil, Obvious Child, The Expendables 3 and We Gotta Get Out Of This Place.
