By Brian Marder
Story
In Norway, Iowa (pop. 586), baseball is what you do by default—there apparently aren’t too many options. It is either baseball or gas-station get-togethers, according to the (true) story in
The Final Season. Set in 1991, the town’s high school baseball team, the Tigers, has amassed 19 State Championships in 22 years, and it is the community’s heart and soul. So when a move is put in place to merge the team with another school’s for budgetary reasons, the townsfolk are understandably outraged. As a nail in the coffin, the team’s longtime coach, Jim Van Scoyoc (
Powers Boothe), is to be replaced by his much-younger and -less-experienced assistant, Kent Stock (
Sean Astin), for the final season. Suddenly, everyone sours on their team and its chances of notching that 20th title. But what they don't know is that there is a diamond-in-the-rough catcher (
Michael Angarano) who has just moved into town—as a punishment by his dad (
Tom Arnold)—and that Stock is every bit as determined as Coach Van Scoyoc to continue Norway’s winning tradition. It initially takes some time for the players to warm up to their new coach, but after a while… Oh, you know the drill.
Acting
The updated score in
Sean Astin’s sports-movie career: football 1, baseball 0. The well-traveled actor can’t quite do for
Season what he did for
Rudy, partly because this movie is cheesy beyond repair. But
Astin, who also executive-produced, is by far the film’s biggest asset, both on and off screen. He soldiers on as Coach Stock, brimming with realistic enthusiasm and fortitude, perhaps to spite the woeful script. Fellow veteran actor
Boothe (
Sin City) rounds out
Season’s two bright spots, as the pitch-perfect embodiment of a baseball sage who doesn’t waste words. But he and
Astin don’t fit in this movie for reasons of authenticity, or lack thereof on the others’ part. That includes onetime Next Big Thing
Rachael Leigh Cook, who plays
Astin’s much-too-cutesy love interest;
Tom Arnold, striking out in a role that is (mercifully!) a near cameo; and
Angarano (
Sky High), who gives a performance that is heavy on cliché and light on realism. Like the movie itself.
Direction
It’s hard to imagine even the youngest of viewers being able to resist sarcastic laughter throughout
The Final Season—that’s just the degree of its corn. Almost everything is wrong here, and the result is a nearly two-hour cliché whose transparency knows no age boundaries. Both director
David M. Evans (
The Sandlot, of course) and writers
Art D'Alessandro and
James Grayford seem to only be concerned with concocting unnecessary melodrama. Most of the movie’s story, for example, is a highly fictionalized addendum to the less-cinematic true story on which it is based. And one scene early on serves as a microcosm of the director’s contrived efforts and forced cheese: After
Angarano’s Mitch plunks his classmate/teammate with a Wiffle ball,
Evans cues music so heavy you’d think you were watching the climax of
Mystic River. It’s utterly laughable and indicative of
Evans’ many missteps. As for the baseball scenes, they look sufficient when shown, but
Final Season is so much less a sports movie than it is the feel-good stuff of Disney TV movies—nay, Disney cartoons.