The Scout (1994)

the audience applauded

Thanks for the memories!

Beautiful, moving film.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Albert Brooks co-wrote and stars in this sometimes-bright but terribly unsubtle comedy about a talent scout for the New York Yankees who loses his reputation after getting a skittish college Freshman signed to the team (the Yankees apparently scheduled the kid to pitch in a televised game without any training or pre-game publicity whatsoever, so don't they get what they deserve?); Brooks is banished to South Central Mexico to find talent, and yet when he comes up with another promising pitcher, he's fired over the telephone (in one of those excruciating sitcom developments the movie occasionally falls prey to). The new pitcher (Brendan Fraser, still in "Encino Man" mode) is a child in a young man's body, thereby linking the scout and the player on an emotionally-needy basis (not solid ground for laugh-out-loud comedy). Brooks as an actor is very ingratiating--he always has been--but this material, despite some very amusing one-liners, is stale, highly concocted, and immature. Many real-life sports luminaries appear in cameos...perhaps they should have been allowed to strengthen the script. ** from ****

I made the grievous error of seeing this movie in the theater. And it has been scorched into my memory as one of the worst I've ever seen. It was billed as a comedy, and I think I may have laughed once? Maybe? It was played as a drama, but without the drama. The ending was so anti-climactic and predictable as to have made the movie even worse than it already was. Brendan Frasier does his standard job of sub-standard acting playing the typical confused, out-of-place character he played in Encino Man, George of the Jungle, the Mummy series, etc. Making matters worse, the writers hint at a possible direction in the story that may make the movie interesting, and they simply drop it in the middle leaving you hanging, but not wanting more.Don't bother, it isn't worth the time.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the movie. I've probably seen it about 10 times, and it never fails to entertain me and give me some good laughs here and there. It's your typical goofy Brendan Frasier comedy, although something tells me that's not what exactly what it was going for. I didn't buy into any of the dramatic elements of the movie... Brendan Frasier's character(his goofy behavior), as well as some of the plot elements made it very hard for me to take the movie completely seriously. The fact that Steve Nebraska (Frasier) was supposedly the "greatest player to ever live" and his ability to strike every batter out with 100+ MPH fastballs and even the ability to hit a home run every time at bat seemed a little ridiculous to me. Also, the conflict that arose towards the middle of the movie (about Nebraska's mysterious past/his family) should have been delved into a little more. But Other than those complaints, I'll say that I enjoyed The Scout for what it was, which was an above average baseball comedy with enough laughs and plenty of entertainment to keep me watching for 2 hours.

The Scout is one of those sports movies that gets it right in enough ways to make it watchable, but gets it wrong enough to make you cringe in more spots than you'd like. Brendan Fraser is really terrific as the dopey, wide-eyed innocent of a pitcher who becomes the subject of a massive game of tug of war at first between teams to see who signs him, and then between his love of baseball and his fear of failure. His career has flourished thanks to roles like this, the downy innocent amid a swamp of leaches. This part of the movie is really good. The huge, over-exaggerated bidding war between baseball clubs for his service, it all is real enough to be familiar, and satirical enough to really make fun of and kind of predict baseball's current situation, in which money has become more and more the driving force behind the game. The movie also has a bevvie of terrific cameos like Bret Saberhagen, Keith Hernandez, who oddly seem mistcast as Mets stars in a movie that circles around the Yankees, and of course, a small but prominant role for Yankee owner George Steinbrenner. But in the end all of this winds into a ridiculous debut outing in the first game of the World Series. Let's start with the fact that you can't just join the roster in the World Series. It doesn't work that way. No matter how touted you are, no team will carry a pitcher on their post-season roster (and no, if you're not on that roster the whole way, you cannot join it) who won't pitch unless you get the Series. It doesn't work that way. And his 81 pitch, 81 strike perfect game is ludicrous. I mean completely preposterous. This is a movie that gets so much right in its satire of the game's economics (the Yankees winning the bidding war here is a nice little nod to the current situation where the Yankees are hated throughout the baseball world for their tossing around of money as if it were the fake paper stuff you get with a Monopoly board) and gets so much wrong in the baseball sense. In how good Steve Nebraska (Fraser) is, all sense of realism is throw horribly out the window, and the movie becomes little more than a silly baseball movie. As a Yankee fan, and a fan of the game itself, i expect better of a baseball movie.