After a career that begun with a bunch of Detroit film students hurling both a camera and each other around a cabin in Tennessee, the 90s saw Sam Raimi take a far more traditional to filmmaking. After the torturous release of his Three Stooges meets Jason And The Argonauts epic, Army Of Darkness, the filmmaker most famous for repeatedly kicking the living shit out of long suffering muse, Bruce Campbell, on screen became something of a gun for hire, making such films as the gonzo Sharon Stone Western, The Quick And The Dead and Coen-esque snow bound thriller, A Simple Plan.
However, while this path would eventually lead to Raimi realising Spider-Man to ridiculous success, standing in the way was possibly the most un-Sam Raimi Sam Raimi movie in existence – the Kevin Costner baseball movie, For Love Of The Game. But was the world really for the world’s most subdued Raimi offering – because I sure wasn’t.
On the eve of an important game against the New York Yankies, old school baseball superstar Billy Chapel is at something of a low ebb. Once a virtually flawless pitcher, time has caught up with Billy and the accumulated wear and tear that comes with hurling a ball the speed of a bullet for nineteen years and he’s also having to contend with his beloved Detroit Tigers being sold off at the end of a long losing streak. However, most effecting is that his girlfriend of 5 years, Jane Aubrey, has decided to kick Billy to the curb and take up a promising job offer in England due to the fact that she never has truly felt that he truly loved her due to his dedication to the game.
Stepping up to the plate after suffering all these personal blows, Billy gets to work slamming balls into the glove of his catcher buddy and striking out everyone who steps up to the plate. However as he does his thing, an emotionally raw Jane desperately tries to ignore the game while she waits at the airport, but as it progresses and remarkable thing starts to occur.
In order to focus on the job at hand and block out the roars of the crowd, Billy finds himself reminiscing about his time with Jane, starting from their first meeting, his introduction to her sixteen year-old daughter, Heather, and the various peaks and troughs in their relationship – but as the game continues, he suddenly realises that he’s in the middle of pitching a possible perfect game.
As the pressure mounts, Billy starts to weight up his life, his relationship with Jane and the very real possibility that this could be his last ever innings regardless of the final outcome.
Simply put, it’s finally time to weigh up his love of the game.
So, to be honest, For Love Of The Game was always going to start off on the wrong foot with me as I’m not exactly crazy about baseball and I’m also pretty resistant to Kevin Costner’s leading man status as a whole, but the promise of a Sam Raimi movie – even one that doesn’t feature a single crash zoom to speak of – was too enticing to turn away. However, while other movies such as A Simple Plan and The Gift also managed to temper the director’s zany visual quirks, at least they offered up intriguing premises that contained mesmerising performances, For Love Of The Game doesn’t even really have that.
To lay it out plainly, one of the movie’s biggest issues is that the romance and the sport aspects of the script work about as well together as oil and water which is strange when you consider how well it worked previously in the likes of Rocky. In fact, there’s so many issues with the lovey dovey stuff I’m amazed no one spotted them on set with the most noticable problem being that there’s absolutely no chemistry between Costner and Kelly Preston whatsoever. It certainly doesn’t help either that Preston has some truly awful dialogue to contend with with her “Is this not America?” rant during one of them many suffocating flashbacks ranking as one of the most toe curling moments I’ve ever seen. But even this pales into insignificance in the face of the film’s biggest hurdle, which proves to be that Coster’s romantic leading man is something of a massive prick – and not one of those charismatic ones either. Nope, just a self involved, entitled dude who puts the people in his life a distant second to the sport he’s devoted his life to. This wouldn’t be a problem if Billy was a lovable rogue, or even remotely likable, but the fact that Costner’s 90s leading man syndrome casts him as basically the greatest baseball player who ever lived and even sees fit to give him a shot at that all-elusive perfect game just simply sticks in the throat.
Yes, you could argue that this is entirely the point, but the fact that everything positive that happens to Billy seems so fucking unearned is made worse by the fact that Raimi stages all the drama as melodrama with amount as much grit as an episode of Peppa Pig projected on a velvet screen. No matter how shitty Billy treats Jane and no matter how far she tries to leave, he still not only manages to finish the game, but he gets a second chance with her – not because he deserves to, but simply because the ending demands it. If Billy had left the game prematurely and forfeited his chance of a perfect game in order to prove to Jane how much he loves her, it would romantic, but would also be a pretty shit sports movie. Alternatively, giving Billy all of the positive endings simply because he’s played by the guy from Field Of Dreams doesn’t work either which suggests the script was fucked no matter what it did.
However, as an example of stops on the journey from The Evil Dead to Spider-Man, there are some things that stand out in a positive light. Among the familiar faces that eventually popped up in Raimi’s wall crawling trilogy is the first collaboration between the director and JK Simmons, the man who still is J. Jonah Jameson and there’s a sneaking suspicion the John C. Reilly may have based his role in Talladega Nights on his slow witted, unfeasibly loyal catcher character.
The real shame is, if the movie had not squeezed the life out of its 2 hour and 17 minute runtime with endless, mawkish flashbacks, there was the bones of an incredibly tense baseball movie. With around 40 minutes of time devoted to Billy edging ever closer to that perfect game, it’s the sole place where the story is even remotely involving with Raimi finally digging into his bag of visual tricks to blur out the crowd or sharp cut to a ball thwacking into a catchers Mitt. In fact, when we get to the last three men that Billy has to strike out, matters actually (finally) get fairly nailbiting.
However, it’s too little, too late to save a movie that stands as that most rarest of things: a truly boring Sam Raimi movie – and for a strike as blatant as that, I’m going to have to call For Love Of The Game well and truly out.
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