A crashing, uninteresting bore

If filmmaking was baseball, Kevin Costner would be out.

Billy Chapel, veteran star baseball player with the Detroit Tigers, is having a bad day. His shoulder hurts, his team has been sold to a corporation which wants to trade him away to a rival team, and his long-standing girlfriend, Jane, has finally got sick of him and is off to London. In the middle of the most important game of his life, his world is falling apart.

This is one of the most tedious films I've seen in a very long time. I must confess I'm not the slightest bit interested in baseball, which partly accounts for the purgatory I endured while sitting through two and a quarter hours of this Kevin Costner epic - but nor am I very interested, anymore, in Costner himself - a once charismatic actor who lately has been in one bad film after another.

Kelly Preston is quite sweet as his long-suffering girlfriend, though why she stayed with him so long is a mystery - as you'll have gathered, Billy's story is mostly told in interminable flashbacks. The biggest mystery is why a talented, visceral director like Sam Raimi, whose last film was the excellent A Simple Plan, could have made such a crashing, uninteresting bore.


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2 min read

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By David Stratton

Source: SBS


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