Producers: Houston Hill, Matt Harvey, Pasha Patriki and Byron Campbell Director: Ty Roberts Screenplay: Lane Garrison Cast: Luke Wilson, Greg Kinnear, Sarah Gadon, Molly Parker, Lew Temple, Martin Roach, Michael Cash, Joaquin Roberts, Etienne Kellici, Nicholas Fry, Jacob Mazeral, Gavin MacIver-Wright, Scott Mackenzie, Zachary David Morton, Josh Reich, Jacob Soley, Evan Hasler, Davide Fair, Seth Murchison, Blake DeLong, Patrick Renna and Ali Hassan Distributor: Well Go USA
Grade: C-
There are more clichés than pitches in this strenuously inspirational baseball tale based on the uplifting appearance of an underdog Texas team in the 2002 Little League world championship series. (The “misfits” made it to a quarter-final elimination round in which they were defeated by the ultimate champions from Kentucky in a game that extended to eleven innings, nearly double the usual span of six.) The script by Lane Garrison is structured around the rise of the Fort Worth squad from inauspicious beginnings at home to a crowd-rousing competitor in Pennsylvania, and the struggles of its two coaches, one suffering with terminal cancer and the other forced to choose between his role in the dugout and an unsatisfying career in a local law firm.
To be honest, the film makes pretty much a hash of the specifics in the Westside team’s unlikely journey; few of their games are touched on, and those that are convey little sense of the action. They just begin as a pack of rambunctious regular-season losers whose joint coaches Bobby Ratliff (Luke Wilson) and Jon Kelly (Greg Kinnear) have been unable to impose any discipline on them. Then they’re recruited to become the Westside All-Stars as the representatives of the Southwest bracket in the multi-tiered series, simply because the regional manager (Patrick Renna) needs a team to sponsor. At the same time Ratliff, the good-natured fellow who’s the driving force behind the team, is diagnosed with a brain tumor, leaving his colleague Kelly to assume control. Each also has a son on the squad: Walker Kelly (Etienne Kellici) is the star pitcher, and Robert Ratliff (Michael Cash) the first baseman.
The team’s quality of play improves—though the movie mostly depicts it in comedic terms—through the addition of demanding assistant coach Mitch Belew (Lew Temple), a former drill sergeant whose son Mitchell (Gavin MacIver-Wright) is also a team member, and the exhortations of Sam Knight (Martin Roach), the owner of the store that sells sporting goods on main street. The boys’ effort is driven by dedicating their play to Coach Ratliff, whose condition deteriorates even as he delays treatment in order to be able to watch from the stands. His plight and the team spirit attract attention from fans and the media all the way through their 2-1 loss to Kentucky. Bobby died the following year, and as depicted here, Kelly delivered the eulogy and the pallbearers were team members.
This story obviously had promise as a combination of underdog sports movie and disease-of-the-week tearjerker, but the execution is ham-fisted. The first problem lies with Lane Garrison’s script, filled with juvenile humor, mawkish speechifying (usually with a religious undercurrent: there’s a faith-based vibe, as in “you’ve got to believe in heaven as well as baseball”) and childish details. Did one player actually blind opposing pitchers with the glare of the sun reflected off his retainer? Did another whiff at bat because he was always looking at a girl he fancied in the bleachers? And was her brother the thin, bespectacled nerd who hit better without his glasses? Whether any of these tropes, or numerous others like them, were true or not, they come off as phony here. And the stream of cutesy lines devised for the players—especially Peanut (Joaquin Roberts), Bobby’s younger son—are cringe-inducing.
It certainly doesn’t help that director Roberts shows little facility in getting natural performances from the boys, all of whom mug mercilessly for the camera, not least young Roberts (his son, perhaps?). He looks a bit like a very young Anthony Michael Hall, but Hall quickly learned a degree of subtlety Joaquin lacks, apparently having been told he was to be a seriocomic highlight and should go for broke on every close-up.
Wilson and Kinnear are better, of course, but even they look uncomfortable delivering much of the hackneyed dialogue Garrison has provided them with. Sarah Gadon and Molly Parker are totally wasted in the thankless roles of the coaches’ ever-supportive wives. Temple and Roach, meanwhile, swing for the fences and come out looking desperate, but even they’re subdued compared to Blake DeLong as Jon’s overbearing boss, who plays the bad guy with unbridled, lip-smacking glee.
“You Gotta Believe” looks pretty threadbare. It was shot in Ontario, and the attempts to pretend otherwise are pretty feeble. There’s a brief sequence filmed at the Fort Worth Stockyards, for instance, as well as a couple other moments in the Texas city; and at one point during a game there’s an abrupt insert of the field sign at Howard J. Lamade Stadium in Williamsport meant to convince us, unsuccessfully, that we aren’t in Canada. But apart from that, the tech credits are mediocre, from Joshua Turpin’s plain production design to Stuart James Cameron’s bland, often jerky cinematography and James K. Crouch’s erratic editing. As to the music, when you hear the old theme from “Rawhide” blaring as the Westside players round the bases, you know you’re in trouble.
Roberts, Garrison and Wilson collaborated on an earlier Texas-set underdog sports movie back in 2021, “12 Mighty Orphans,” about a football team from a home for boys that won the state title in 1938. It wasn’t very good, but this follow-up is worse—a Little League baseball movie that makes “The Bad News Bears” look like a masterpiece (and I mean the remake, not the original).
The archival footage from 2002 and a coda featuring a grown-up Robert Ratliff and his son, however, score while the overall dramatization strikes out.