Swing and a miss for sports film
It’s a box of Cracker Jack with curry, and while that may sound tantalizingly exotic, Million Dollar Arm turns out to be a surprisingly generic sports movie from the candy content factory called Disney.
Based on a true story, this movie by Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl) follows the hard-luck saga of sports agent JB Bernstein (Jon Hamm), a guy who walked away from a big agency to make it on his own — à la Jerry Maguire — only to face a mountain of unpaid bills and the prospect of losing his little blue Porsche.
JB needs a big break to keep the shingle on the door, but when his prime NFL prospect walks, he’s pretty sure it’s game over.
He doesn’t have the clout to win over the biggies, and all the little ones are already spoken for.
JB needs to think out of the batter’s box, which means it’s only a matter of time before we get a huge close-up of actor Jon Hamm looking pensive as he watches a cricket game on television.
We can almost hear the whirr and click of the cogs as he processes the speed of each bowler, the swing of the bat and the massive popular appeal of a sport that demands a skill set similar to baseball.
Five minutes of unnecessary exposition later, we’re riding in a Mumbai taxi with JB on a quest to find the next baseball great via a contest called The Million Dollar Arm, a public talent show aimed at recruiting untrained, amateur athletes with the mechanical ability to throw a fastball.
The rest is a predictable mishmash of disastrous tryouts among goats and chickens, culture clash comedy bits and some poorly scripted sequences between the characters aimed at buttering us up for the big emotional finale.
Everything that needs to be there is there. But the emotional side proves the weakest because this movie never stops throwing pitches.
It wants us to care about JB, the self-centred jerk at the heart of the piece. It wants us to care about the two young prospects he brings back to the United States (Suraj Sharma and Madhur Mittal). It wants us to care about the budding romance between JB and Brenda (Lake Bell), the gal next door.
And it also wants us to care about the very embodiment of the American ideal, baseball itself.
The movie is cooking so many dishes on a single stovetop, every plot line grows lukewarm by the time it’s finally served up on the screen.
The only character who brings his own heat source is Alan Arkin. The veteran actor plays an aging scout who reluctantly heads to India to help JB, but keeps his eyes closed for most of the journey — preferring to hear the ball hit the leather instead of watching a single pitch.
Arkin’s character is off-the-rack Arkin, but the whole movie feels mass produced. Even the wonderfully authentic little turn from Bill Paxton as a USC trainer and sports psychologist feels packaged, as does Bell’s chipper, earthy romantic interest.
Hamm is the only actor working outside expectation because he’s playing a whiny, self-absorbed, greedy weakling.
On the page, JB is a total tool, but there’s something about Hamm’s screen presence that makes JB likable — and that, weirdly, interferes with the dramatic arc.