Film Review: Major League – 8/10

‘Free admission to anyone who was actually alive the last time the Indians won a pennant...’

A beleaguered sports coach has to somehow manage a team of ragtag misfits to glory. We’ve seen this many times before. Cool Runnings. The Mighty Ducks. The Longest Yard. Best of the Best. I could go on. The reason there are so many of these films is that the premise is irresistible. Everyone loves an underdog story…

Following the death of her husband, trophy wife Rachel Phelps (Margaret Whitton) takes ownership of the Cleveland Indians and vows to drive attendance low enough to move the franchise to Miami. In a precursor to the massively overrated Apple TV + comedy Ted Lasso, Phelps purposefully assembles a team of has-beens and never-will-bes in the hope that they will lose every game. Coach Brown (James Gammon) has other ideas.

A deliciously simple premise but one that could easily fall apart with the wrong cast and the wrong script. Luckily, writer-director David S. Ward knows how to write a screenplay (he wrote both The Sting and Sleepless in Seattle), and the cast knock it out of the park also. The characters are fairly stock, Tom Berenger’s passionate veteran, Charlie Sheen’s erratic rookie, Wesley Snipes’ unpredictable wildcard, but the performances are so good that it doesn’t matter how much this film conforms to pre-existing tropes. Crucially, while Major League is funny when it needs to be, everyone is taking this film seriously. This is what Hollywood never understood about the success of ’80s action/sports movies. The audience doesn’t want people constantly winking to camera. Sure, those movies could be cheesy, but it was their sincerity that people responded to. And so it is here.

Major League is a classic baseball movie, a classic sports movie and a classic ’80s movie. Anyone who loves that era of cinema will love Major League. I was gripped from the first moment to the last. Go Indians!