Cast: Keanu Reeves, Diane Lane, D.B. Sweeney, Mike McGlone
Director: Brian Robbins
Producers: Tina Nides, Michael Tollin, Brian Robbins
Screenplay: John Gatins, based on "Hardball: A Season in the Projects" by Daniel Coyle
Cinematography: Tom Richmond
Music: Mark Isham
U.S. Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Hardball has variously been compared to The Bad News Bears and The Mighty Ducks, but this movie strives to be more hard-hitting than either of those family-friendly, comedic efforts. A more apropos likening might be to Dangerous Minds, the flaccid, Hollywood-ized tale of a teacher who makes a difference to her underprivileged students. Hardball is about a reluctant baseball coach who changes the lives of his pre-teen players even as they change his perspective on his own existence. The movie is occasionally trite, often formulaic, and frequently familiar. Surprisingly, however, there are times when Hardball displays some real heart, and that keeps it from being a complete waste of time.
Keanu Reeves plays Conor O'Neill, a gambling addict who is up to his neck in debt and desperate for a way out. A high-roller friend of his (Mike McGlone) offers him a supplemental source of income - he will pay Conor $500 per week to coach a baseball team of children living in Chicago's projects. A desperate but unenthusiastic Conor agrees. At first, his approach to coaching is perfunctory, but, as he grows to know his charges, he becomes interested in doing what he can for them. His apparently genuine interest in his eleven team members attracts the attention of the kids' English teacher, Elizabeth Wilkes (Diane Lane), who finds herself drawn to Conor, rough edges and all.
Hardball is a sea of underdeveloped plot elements. There's a lot of rich material here, but director Brian Robbins uses it as background color. Take Conor's gambling problems, for example - these are just a plot device by which he ends up coaching the kids. When they're no longer necessary to the story, the screenplay comes up with a way to quickly and effectively remove them. Then there are the kids, each of whom is reduced to a stereotype defined by his problem (too old to play, too young to play, out of shape and asthmatic, etc.). The love story is trite and the relationship between Conor and his kids never deviates from the Hollywood bonding trajectory. The film also fails to present a key element of the sports aspect of its formula - how Conor's training methods transform these losers into winners. After one abysmal game, they're suddenly playing winning baseball. We are never accorded more than a momentary glimpse of the methods Conor utilizes to fashion this amazing transformation.
For lead actor Keanu Reeves, Hardball is a case study in how far he has come as an actor, and how far he still has to go. Reeves is no longer the vacant-eyed, inept performer who bumbled his way through countless films. In some of his recent efforts (most notably The Gift), he has shown real acting ability. There are flashes of it in Hardball, but there are also instances when he's obviously stretching. Other than Reeves, no one has much screen time. Diane Lane is pretty boring in a limited supporting role. D.B. Sweeney oozes nastiness as a rival coach. And the kids - all eleven of them - do adequate jobs considering the limitations of their parts.
There are times when Hardball works. Then ending, while melodramatic, has an impact. And there are little throw-away scenes here and there (such as the one in which Conor suddenly realizes that Elizabeth likes him) that make the movie endurable. Overall, however, Hardball doesn't bring anything new or especially interesting to the table. It wants to be a lot of things from a hard-hitting drama about life in the projects to a feel-good story of triumph over adversity, but only does as much as the formula permits. (And the very last scene, which force-feeds closure, is a source of aggravation.) When its list of faults are catalogued, the most serious crime Hardball is guilty of is soft-peddling.
© 2001 James Berardinelli