Thehibikiew Not even bad in a good way

GazerRise Fantastic!

Micah Lloyd Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Benas Mcloughlin Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

adonis98-743-186503 Detroit Tigers Veteran Pitcher Billy Chapel (Costner) has always been better at baseball than at love. Just ask Jane (Preston), his on-and-off girlfriend. After a bad season, just before he is about to start in what could be his final game, Jane tells Billy that she's leaving him...for good. Now with his career and love-life in balance, Billy battles against his emotional and physical limits as he strives for a Perfect Game. For Love of the Game Director Sam Raimi fails to deliver the Sports, Romance Drama that he wanted to give to his fans, Kevin Costner and Kelly Preston do have a nice chemistry together and their both fine in this film but the movie focuses more on their boring and long relationship threw some flashbacks that get annoying after some time and honestly they aren't even interesting at all. We never see Billy's relationship with his Parents, his Friends or anyone else and even if we do it's only for a few seconds and some great actors such as J.K Simmons and Brian Cox are useless enough and even if you cut them out of the picture the movie would still be a big mess. It does have some good moments and the acting is fine but the actual plot and the boring love story gets you out of the film's actual experience. (5/10)

Lars Lendale ****************** ATTENTION SPOILERS !!!!!!!!!!!!!! ***********************The movie is supposedly a baseball movie and simultaneously a romance. The lone protagonists are Costner and Preaston, but the movie is actually exclusively centered around Costner. Which could be criticized for poor character development, but at the same time, besides Costner, the rest of the cast delivers meaningless contributions. Well first because the story is cheesy, much too clichè, to the point where you can actually fill in the lines because you know anticipate the dialogue. Then, the movie is really bailing water: it's not a sports movie, it's a bad romance because the relationship is not believable, it's only centered around Costner's flashbacks in the middle of a game. Wow, seriously ? And he manages fine until his hand and his shoulder give up, which for x & y reasons, is weird. In reality he would take a PCR shot but it would not enable him to throw so consistently well at his age. Costner is a chameleon, and I get that he did this movie to cover up for his divorce lawsuit. But this script is too uninspired and incoherent for him to lift it up to a decent level. The whole green eyed blond mom at 16 with a job that seems to pay well yet her job is not clear, since she is part time but doesn't have her own car, the sudden interaction between her daughter and Costner out of nowhere, the goofy Sunuski who keeps calling Costner 'chappy' (so overdone), the manager who steps down to a player's orders, the owner who sells the team because he doesn't believe in baseball which actually would be because the team stinks fails to reach the playoffs and it leads to bankruptcy, there are so many elements that make it unwatchable. It takes a lot of poise not get irritated by them.

The_Film_Cricket 'For Love of the Game' combines two stories: One I had a genuine interest in and the other a tired wheezy old genre piece that I've seen a million times. Sad thing is, it's the latter that eventually takes over completely.The movie stars Kevin Costner (who until now had never been in a bad sports movie) as Billy Chapel, a 40 year-old pitcher who's game has seen better days. He's close to retirement and as the movie opens he has set an elegant dinner for his girlfriend who never shows. Even worse (and these things just conveniently happen on the same day) he has been traded and the team has been sold.I might have been genuinely interested in the story of an over-the-hill pitcher and his struggle to hold onto the talent that he once had and that alone is what drew me to the movie. But director Sam Raimi hammers together a tired old love story complete with all the nuts and bolts that no bad love story is ever without.There is the obligatory scene in which the two meet-cute in an unusual place (by the roadside when her car breaks down). She doesn't know who he is and knows virtually nothing about baseball (would it be too much to ask the screenwriters if the hero could fall for a sports nut?). The fall madly in love before she loses confidence in him and a huge misunderstanding leads to one of those big emotional scenes in which it looks like she will leave him forever to take a job overseas. Does she? I guarantee that you have seen this movie before and know the outcome.The movie is a surprise to me. Costner has starred in plenty of bad movies but until this movie he has never starred in a bad sports movie especially baseball after gems like 'Bull Durham' and 'Field of Dreams'. He's made his mark as box office poison in the sci-fi genre but I hope this doesn't mean that that reputation is moving over to the sports movie arena.I'm also surprised that this movie comes from Sam Raimi. In 1998 he made the hard-edged 'A Simple Plan', the story of three men who find $4,000,000 in a plane crash and struggle to keep it a secret which leads to distrust and tragedy. That movie was about human nature and never for once did we anticipate where it was going.There are two scenes in 'For Love of the Game' in which Costner is on the mound and is able to block out everything around him by 'Focusing on the mechanism'. Perhaps that logic should have been applied to the screenplay.

PJ Fuller A couple of quick points. First, John C. O'Reilly was really, REALLY miscast in this movie, There's no way he should have been cast, but he played the character as a sentimental sap....most catchers are hard-ass, get-it-done now guys who know the game well - but not overly sentimental. This really affected the baseball aspect of the movie. Second...the trade to the Giants. The trading deadline is done by this time of the year, and the waiver-wire deals are also done, so there's no way he'd be traded - especially to name the team he'd be traded to. That's a call for the GM. A better plot line would to be that the new owners want to commit to a youth movement and will move Chapel in the off-season for a prospect or two...but either way, he's done in Detroit. But Costner & baseball are a good fit - bad fitting uni's and all...