Movie Review: 42

I've always said that the only thing baseball is good for it the movies. I love baseball movies (the best is Moneyball), but can't stand to watch baseball. I just hate it. It is one of the worst sports.

And yet, baseball movies are great. And the story of Jackie Robinson is an amazing story. So if you combine the two, you should get a great movie, right? Right!?

That looks totally natural, doesn't it?

I'm not even going to take the time to explain the plot of this movie. It's about Jackie Robinson. You already know the story. 

The Review

This movie was a huge disappointment. It had the potential to be A+, 10/10 material, but it wasn't. The movie fell flat in several key areas. 

First of all, the movie had some really badly written scenes. A lot of them were just so incredibly cheesy. It seemed like the writers were searching for points to stick in great sounding quotes for the trailer, and not finding any great ones. So instead of leaving them out, they just threw them in randomly. A lot of the quotes you see in the trailers, such as "You want a player who doesn't have the guts to fight?" "No, I want a player who has the guts, not to fight," sound great, but don't fit into the conversation being said, and seem awkward and forced. 

The movie also felt like it was trying really hard to be a feel good film, which doesn't seem to fit in with this story, especially when people are shouting "nigger" all the time. The music they chose to play during most of the movie was the kind that normally happens during the final homerun of the entire movie, as everything falls into place and everyone lives happily ever after. 

This music literally played every time Jackie Robinson did anything. Even when he got hit in the head with a ball.

It really felt like the creators tried to make a happy, family friendly, Disney like movie, and then decided to throw the word nigger around, just to make it realistic. 

The thing that makes lots of biopic, historical movies awesome is how realistic they make all the characters  You really feel like you're there during that time, where ever it happens to be. This movie almost completely failed to do that. Every character was one dimensional and flat throughout the whole movie. Towards the end they tried to round off a few of them, but it didn't really work. 

Basically every character was there for one purpose, and none of them were really examined outside their relationship to Jackie. The movie Lincoln had many great, round characters, most of which were not Abe. This movie had none. 

At least half of the movie is people making fun of Robinson, and then him proving them wrong by hitting a pitch or something along those lines. Sure, it's a nice message and it's a great story, but there was a lot more to the story they could have examined. 

The creators tried to show how even Robinson's own team didn't love him at first, but then, slowly but surely, they grew to respect him. I guess the movie does this, but it doesn't examine how it happened for most of the characters  A lot of them are shown in one scene avoiding eye contact with him or something  and then shown again later shaking his hand or really awkwardly putting his arm around Jackie and talking to him in the cheesiest way possible. Only one or two characters are actually shown progressing.

Throughout, actors seem to go from good to bad to great to bad over and over again. Harrison Ford has a couple scenes where he is awesome, but than many where he is just awkward and bad. The same goes for most of the white players on the team as well. It's a weird inconsistency.

All that said, there are good parts of this movie. First, the story of Jackie Robinson is so great, you can only mess it up so bad. There are a couple of scenes that stand out (one involves a lot of shouting) as better than the rest of the movie (though the scene with the shouting is followed up by some of Harrison Ford's worst acting ever). The scenes where everything falls into place, the acting, the writing and the music, are quite awesome, and it's sad because these few scenes show what amazing potential the movie had.

Update: Another thought, not really about the movie itself, but sort of: The tagline "The True Story of an American Legend" is so cheesy and cliché-y and generic, much like the movie itself.

The Bottomline
42 could have been great. Throughout the movie, we see a couple of scenes that display how great it could have been (very). The quality of the acting and writing varies greatly throughout, and when they come together, the movie is great. but far too often, both are bad, and basically the same scenes repeat over and over again in new places, with slightly different stereotypical racist white men (just realized there were no racist women with speaking parts, besides one tiny thing towards the beginning).
If you're a huge baseball fan and like the Jackie Robinson, the movie isn't so bad you won't want to watch it. But, if you can't decide wether or not to go, you're not missing out on anything amazingly amazing if you stay at home.

6.75/10
  
The top score is my score. The bottom score is the IMDB score, which take sinto account over 100 scores from critics and regular people. 

The Trailer

Get showtimes and tickets to 42 here.