‘I don’t know if I have anything left...’
Kevin Costner is the king of the sports movie. Field of Dreams. Tin Cup. Draft Day. He’s done them all. They don’t call him King Kev for nothing. And by ‘they’ I mean me and my three other mates. For Love of the Game sees Costner pairing up for an unlikely partnership with horror maestro Sam Raimi to produce something that leans much further on the oeuvre of the former than it does the latter…
Billy Chapel (Costner) is a baseball legend. When he injures his hand on the eve of his final game, Chapel must lean on his teammate Gus (John C. Reilly) and his coach Frank (JK Simmons) to try and pull him over the line. That’s one movie. And that’s the best movie that features here. The second movie is the one in which Billy struggles to combine his love for the game with his love for his sometime girlfriend Jane (Kelly Preston). Either of these premises could have made for a cracking 90 minute movie. By mushing them together, Raimi and his cast have to settle for something that is good, rather than great.
Movies about football are pretty much always terrible (apart from Mike Bassett: England Manager, of course). American sports seem to lend themselves to cinema in a way that football simply can’t. Boxing. American football. And. as with this film, baseball. This is manifested here by the fact that the baseball scenes are genuinely dramatic and thrilling, despite the fact that I had no real idea what was going on most of the time. Raimi renders the action in sprawling slow motion – King Kev has never looked more magnificent – and while this sometimes comes across as a little much, it mostly works.
Costner is great at selling these sports movies and his unique passion drives everything in For Love of the Game. In the hands of almost any other actor this would be unbearably over the top. Costner takes the theatrical melodrama of a Bon Jovi song and crafts it into something more palatable. A Springsteen song perhaps. And yes it’s too long, and yes it’s a little cheesy (particularly the saccharine conclusion) but it’s also a lot of fun.
Certainly not Costner’s best sports movie but in a canon as impressive as his, that is no bad thing.