A baseball movie about a sociopath....but it can't be both at the same time, so which path does it take? It takes the sociopath path which is not a bad path to take in movies...but it's not a very strong path to take when you're limited with your budget (it's a B-movie, period) and you decide to take only 90 minutes of viewing pleasures for your audience. Sociopaths are very complex creatures that none of us (even the best of psychologists and psychiatrists) can figure out completely. The main character is played with a convincing menace and laissez-faire attitude by Mark Mench that you can't help but be drawn in to his struggle to bring everyone else around him down to his level of pure hatred and narcissism. Too bad it's full of dialog that is unreal and too theatrical. Too bad that it does not concentrate moreso on the baseball aspect than the staged settings. Too bad it just doesn't work overall. It's a very dark and brooding film about a very disturbed individual who is determined to bring everyone else around him (including a fictional baseball team of which he is one of the best baseball players of all time) down to a level that is beyond the seven levels of hell imagined by Dante. It's an okay movie, but the ending especially ruined it with its liaise-faire attitude of "fuck the viewer, I'm tired and I'm just gonna end this movie with a cliché ending that ties into a previous moment halfway through this movie...yeah it's supposed to be significant, but only on a superficial level." And for that attitude and ending that the director, Daniel Kraus, gives to us...well, I have to give to you a big "fuck you." Look elsewhere for any type of baseball or sociopath movie, unless you're bored and completely full of narcissism of the deepest levels. So much promise, too much self-pleasure by Kraus.
