Million Dollar Arm

Based on a true story, Million Dollar Arm follows struggling sports agent J.B. Bernstein (Jon Hamm) as he hatches a scheme to transform two Indian athletes into professional baseball players. It’s an inherently compelling premise that is, in the movie’s early stages, employed to familiar yet watchable effect by Craig Gillespie, as the filmmaker, working from Thomas McCarthy’s script, does a nice job of infusing the proceedings with a compulsively watchable feel that’s heightened by Hamm’s typically appealing work as the protagonist. The simplicity of the setup, however, finds itself more and more at odds with Gillespie’s deliberate sensibilities and McCarthy’s reliance on superfluous, hackneyed narrative threads, with, in terms of the latter, the film unfolding in an almost eye-rollingly predictable manner that’s compounded by the trajectory of Hamm’s charismatic character (ie J.B. ultimately learns to slow down and appreciate life, in the sort of transformation that used to be represented by a shift from slicked-back hair to a more natural coif). There naturally reaches a point at which the movie’s more appealing elements (eg the culture clash experienced by various characters) are lost beneath its padded-out, lumbering atmosphere, and it’s clear, too, that the feel-good final stretch is unable to even partially pack the uplifting punch that Gillespie has intended. Million Dollar Arm might’ve worked had it topped out at 90 minutes, and yet it ultimately seems obvious that this material is inherently not able to sustain a feature-length endeavor.

*1/2 out of ****