You Gotta Believe (now streaming on Netflix) is a BOATSS (Based On A True Sports Story) movie about the 2002 Fort Worth Little League baseball team that enjoyed an improbable run to the World Series. How much of the movie is truly based in truth is debatable – WAS this team indeed a ragtag group of misfits who miraculously got their act together to achieve greatness? – but one truly true thing is how the kids dedicated the season to a player’s father who was fighting terminal cancer, and inspired them to give it their all. He’s played by Luke Wilson, and Greg Kinnear co-headlines this movie that might have just barely enough oomph to yank a tear or two as it crosses home plate.
The Gist: The baseball is bad. Real bad. These Fort Worth boys can’t run, catch, pitch or hit worth a dang. Bobby Ratliff (Wilson) is the de facto coach while his best pal and the real coach, Jon Kelly (Kinnear), works on his regular work-type work – he’s a lawyer – on the end of the bench. Too much for Jon to do to care about baseball, it seems. The last game of the godforsaken year ends and Jon is approached by Kliff (Patrick Renna, surely cast because he was in The Sandlot) to see if those boys might participate in the official Little League tournament. Why? Nobody else wants to do it for some reason. Interesting. Seems like a plot hole.
Meanwhile, after the game, Bobby’s playing in the yard with his two boys Robert (Michael Cash) and Peanut (Joaquin Roberts) when he collapses. The diagnosis is bad: Cancer. Brain tumor. Melanoma. He has a few months to live. Treatment will be rough. Once Jon hears the bad news, he decides to coach the boys in the tournament, because he knows Bobby lives to watch Robert play ball. Jon recruits one of the other dads, Mitch Belew (Lew Temple), as his assistant, and local card-shop owner Sam (Martin Roach) drops in to help. As the chemo wears Bobby down, Jon moves some guys around and Mitch whips them into fighting shape, but not before a fly ball bounces off a kid’s head and a bat accidentally gets tossed through the window of Jon’s Benz.
The first game is pandelerium. The opposing team’s arrogant coach and his ace pitcher get tossed, and Our Boys pull off a win. They get some luck when an opposing superstar pitcher drops out, and they use every advantage possible to upend the odds, e.g., one kid can’t hit, but he always draws a walk because the sun reflecting off his braces distracts the pitcher. Uh huh. They come together during a musical montage featuring the song “Rawhide.” Bobby finds a way to summon the strength to attend every game, even if it means rescheduling his treatment appointments. Bobby’s wife Patti (Sarah Gadon) and Jon’s wife Kathy (Molly Parker) fret and sew and comfort each other and lend support, because that’s what mom-wives in these movies do. Will the boys make it all the way to Pennsylvania for the World Series tournament? Will they win even if they don’t win, so to speak? What will happen with Bobby? No spoilers, but there’s prolly gonna be some crying in baseball this time around.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Sandlot, The Rookie, The Perfect Game, Hardball, The Bad News Bears if it was really watered down, and probably at least a dozen others.
Performance Worth Watching: Kinnear and Wilson are old pros who could sleepwalk their way through material like this, and they almost do. Considering their output in recent years, we should be thankful that You Gotta Believe isn’t a wallop-you-over-the-head faith-based movie, and instead reduces its prayer/heaven talk down to one scene.
Memorable Dialogue: Lots of bromides here, e.g., “Laughter is just Prozac without the side effects” and “They don’t need to be motivated by me, they need to be motivated by each other. And I don’t mean now, I mean for the rest of their lives.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: It’s pretty clear that director Ty Roberts and screenwriter Lane Garrison felt the need to gussy up this true story with some of the standard fodder of this subgenre, specifically, the wisecracking 12-year-olds, a handful identified by one slightly wacky trait each, such as the glasses kid or the one who’s obsessed with impressing the girls. It feels half-hearted. The boys never stand out as true characters, and this broadening of the material, allegedly for the purpose of mainstream audience appeal, ultimately dilutes the core drama here: A family’s attempt to manage the sudden emergence of mortality in their midst, and a final-act classic pitcher’s-duel endurance test of a game that stretched all the way to 11 innings.
And so the Hollywoodish fabrications mix poorly with the real-life stuff, and none of it ends up being particularly effective. It’s as if Roberts doesn’t trust the power of the core material. Pare down You Gotta Believe to its most potent qualities, and you’ve got a poignant family drama punctuated by a thriller of a baseball game. The cast is absolutely game for a slightly heavier treatment, and in the hands of a visually inspired filmmaker, the sports action would pop nicely.
But we’re here to assess the film as it is, not what it could be, and what we have is a sloppily structured narrative with ineffective stabs at comedy, choppy pacing and very little tension and release. The inelegant editing makes it feel like Roberts didn’t always get the necessary coverage and pieced together whatever he had, and tonally, whether the film’s hoping to make us laugh or cry, this particular soda lacks the necessary fizz. This is just another collection of underdog-sports-movie cliches that has us believing that this story deserved a better treatment.
Our Call: You Gotta Believe tries to be something for everyone and ends up being a bland amalgamation of familiarities. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
