'Final Season' strikes out
Published Oct. 19, 2007
Dear up-and-coming screenwriters,
If you want the Hollywood big wigs to pick your screenplay, I suggest your script be a sports movie that portrays one or more of the following phrases: "based on a true story," "David vs. Goliath," "underdogs" or "against all odds."
If your sports flick features kids, it's a lock. If said kids are playing against a topical, oppressive country, then you will make millions.
But until you write "Dream Catchers: How the U.S. Tee-Ball Team Beat North Korea," you have "The Final Season" to hold you over.
"The Final Season" tells the story of a small town in Iowa and its equally small high school baseball team, the Norway Tigers.
The Tigers have been the proverbial David every year, beating big school Goliaths to win 19 championships in 23 years.
But this year, those damn school board bureaucrats want Norway to be absorbed into a large school system.
To ensure that the team does not win its 20th championship, Norway's long-time coach is fired.
Kent Stock (Sean Astin), a lowly man whose experience is limited to a small crack at assistant coaching, takes his place.
The rest of the script plays out like all other sports movies.
The team struggles at the beginning, finds some miraculous intervention that shows them what they have been missing and turns it around. Along the way, you will find sports movie clichés as worn as an old catcher's mitt.
"The Final Season" takes the time-tested components of a troubled teen, a coach finding love and a town coming together and stretches it over almost two hours.
The acting is hardly the driving force of this movie. Astin and the other leads are run-of-the-mill, and for some reason, the audience is forced to believe Tom Arnold can play a workaholic.
The action on the field is not anything to jump up and down about, but then again, it is in the context of high school baseball in Iowa.
At the end of the film, you will not find yourself inspired as much as you will find yourself experiencing déjà vu. You will ask, "Haven't I seen this before?" The answer is yes, you have, but when you first saw it, it was on a basketball court/ice rink/football field/soccer pitch.
To end this review, I will now include cheesy baseball puns in my analysis: Although this movie leads off with a good premise, the ho-hum plot will leave you wanting to leave before the seventh-inning stretch.
The actors cannot drive anything in and leave the audience stranded at third. Although the bases are loaded with clichés, "The Final Season" can't even muster a bunt, let alone a grand slam.