Rent The Scout on Amazon Video (paid link)
Written by: Roger Angell (article), Andrew Bergman and Albert Brooks & Monica Mcgowan Johnson (screenplay)
Directed by: Michael Ritchie
Starring: Albert Brooks, Brendan Fraser, Dianne Wiest, Michasel Rapaport, J.K. Simmons
Rated: PG-13
Watch the trailer
Plot
The story of a baseball scout who discovers a talented but troubled baseball player.
Verdict
This isn't comedic enough to be a comedy, but it's not serious enough to be a drama. This floats in between doing neither well. Steve Nebraska's baseball ability and performance is either a joke or written by someone that doesn't know baseball. The enigma that is Steve's past is never determined. Al's greed and selfish motives are ignored. This sets up a troubled baseball player who must succeed in the final game without resolving any of the surrounding issues.
Skip it.
Review
Despite the ideas this introduces, the movie is so shallow. A scout wants to make money off a prospect, but the prospect has unresolved issues. This is billed as a comedy and has a few jokes, but that doesn't blend well with a story that's serious but not treated as such. The Phenom is another baseball movie that does a great job of offering an introspective look at similar issues, but it does suffer from it's own narrative problems.
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| Albert Brooks plays Al Picolo |
Al Percolo (Albert Brooks) is a scout that will say anything to recruit a player. This is probably the funniest part of the movie as he talks about Mickey Mantle's nun sister Mickie and Lou Gehrig's tutor.
I get you need to truncate the timeline to get into the main plot, but I don't see a college freshman getting to the major leagues this quickly. The player is completely unprepared and scout Al get shipped to Central America as revenge. Al stumbles upon Steve Nebraska (Brendan Fraser), a player with undeniable and limitless skill. Steve can pitch as fast as 109 mph which is crazy now and even wilder back then. Not only that, Steve can bat effectively from both sides of the plate. He's the ultimate video game baseball player with all the stats maxed.
While this is a baseball movie, there is very little baseball action. That's relegated to closeups of Fraser "winding up" and then the catcher tumbling backwards upon catching the pitch. Even the few athlete cameos are relegated to closeups.
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| Brendan Fraser plays Steve Nebraska |
Al has found his proverbial lottery ticket, hoping that Steve will get him back into baseball. Steve is in his twenties presumably, but he acts like he's twelve. It's obvious that is going to develop into a larger problem as there's some kind of trauma in Steve's past. The movie does very little with either of these plot elements. We never discover the cause of Steve's trauma and in essence he just gets over it which is unsatisfying.
The plot culminates in Steve nervous about his first game and unwilling to play. Al manages to talk him down and we get a cookie cutter happy ending without resolving any character problems. Steve plays ball just like Al wanted, and we ignore how that benefits Al and Steve's underlying issues. How did Steve end up in Central America? What happened to him? It doesn't matter because Al gets paid.
I have to take issue with the final game. Steve Nebraska throws a perfect game with twenty-seven strikeouts on eighty-one pitches. It's the fewest number of pitches possible while striking out everyone. It's unrealistic to such a degree that it seems like parody or some kind of joke. The most strikeouts in a game is twenty. It's happened five times. The fewest number of pitches was 119 by Max Scherzer in 2016. When this movie came out twenty strikeouts in a game had only happened once when Roger Clemens threw 151 pitches in 1986.
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