For Love of the Game

For Love of the Game asks whether the same qualities that make an athlete a champion don't also destroy his happiness. The answer, unfortunately, is long-winded and redundant... But some of the baseball scenes are good.

This is no perfect -- or even half-perfect -- game. It's another movie where conventions are subbed for life lessons, where the emotions are cued by golden oldies and where the motivation (at least on the studio's part) isn't love of the game but money.

Here are two things that definitely don't go together: baseball and piano music.

The baseball sequences are fabulous, not least because Costner looks and moves like a real player a rarity for actors in sports movies... But the love story, a five-year off-and-on affair, is little more than a sop to Costner's romantic faithful.

On the field, Costner is consistent, but his exploration of Billy's romantic dilemma is superficial and often wooden.

Those flashbacks will drive you nuts. As if baseball didn't drag on long enough, almost every inning or out of that Yankees game is punctuated by a memory.

It might not be Kevin Costner's best baseball movie but For Love of the Game is still a solid baseball film after 25 years.

It's kind of like watching an actual baseball game: deliberate and slow, but occasionally perfect.

"Bull Durham" is a more powerful movie than "For Love of the Game," so Kevin Costner might be better as a savvy minor league catcher than a hall-of-fame major league pitcher, but the fact is, Costner is simply and utterly baseballic. He's baseballerific.

Every scene away from the ballpark is in foul territory.