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The movie revolves around the Perfect Game performance of 40-year-old pitcher Billy Chapel as he flashes through his career and his relationship with his on-and-off girlfriend, while pitching his final game.
Far more horrifying than Evil Dead, Sam Raimi's attempt at making a sports-oriented romance strikes out, forfeits and loses three times before its two hours and 10 minutes are up.
This is no perfect -- or even half-perfect -- game. It's another movie where conventions are subbed for life lessons, where the emotions are cued by golden oldies and where the motivation (at least on the studio's part) isn't love of the game but money.
Those flashbacks will drive you nuts. As if baseball didn't drag on long enough, almost every inning or out of that Yankees game is punctuated by a memory.
Vanity is one thing, but Costner's act is beginning to feel like a particularly self-righteous -- and tiresome -- form of pathology. Someone should tell him that an actor's job is to disappear into his characters, not vice-versa.
The baseball sequences are fabulous, not least because Costner looks and moves like a real player a rarity for actors in sports movies... But the love story, a five-year off-and-on affair, is little more than a sop to Costner's romantic faithful.
For Love of the Game asks whether the same qualities that make an athlete a champion don't also destroy his happiness. The answer, unfortunately, is long-winded and redundant... But some of the baseball scenes are good.