The Scout (1994)

BRENDAN FRASER seems to specialize in playing dumb--or at least that's the impression I had after watching him emote as a child-like baseball player who happens to have a great pitching arm in THE SCOUT. He does get laughs with his dumb act, so I suppose that's why he was chosen for this particular role.But most of the laughs come from the fact that ALBERT BROOKS is his co-star, a man who can say a funny line without ever giving a hint that he thinks it's funny. And sometimes, the result is hilarious--particularly in the "knife" scene in which Brooks is trying to hide all his kitchen knives from Fraser who "wants to cut something".None of the humor is particularly subtle, but DIANNE WIEST is a welcome addition as Dr. Aarons, the psychiatrist who determines that Fraser might have his dangerous moments after subjecting him to a series of tests with photos. But the baseball scenes at the finish are too over-the-top, straining credulity to the limits.The Tony Bennett nightclub sequence is also guaranteed to have you squirming in discomfort as Fraser sings an off-key version of "I Left My Heart in San Francisco", much to Bennett's chagrin.Summing up: With a wittier script and a different approach, could have been a very winning comedy.

Al (Albert Brooks) is, at the moment, a hapless scout for the New York Yankees. His last sure thing pitcher tossed his cookies on the mound in front of the huge crowd, just before he bolted for the turnpike. Al is sent to Mexico this time and not in any known territory. Unbelievably, in the Mexican hinterland, an American named Steve Nebraska is just waiting for Al to discover him. And, what a discovery! Steve can pitch at 106 miles an hour and hit a baseball over 600 feet, even if he is a bit weird. Al brings Steve back to NY and the Yankees, most impressed, sign him on one condition. Nebraska must pass a psychological examination! Can he do it? Will the shrink dandily named H. Aaron help? The premise of this movie, along with Albert Brooks' fine performance, are enough to sustain this movie to the end. Fraser, also, does another fine turn as the freaky kid on the block. But, one can not help but say what if. There are several loose ends that just never get tied and the result is a good movie but not a great one. Bull Durham, Major League, and It Happens Every Spring, now these are fine baseball movies. This one just doesn't measure up. Still, if you are a baseball movie fan, you will want to see this one, sure. This film is loaded with good ideas that are worth exploring and jabbering about. Stock up on hotdogs and colas and invite the baseball buddies over for a screening.

After drafting two consecutive lemons into the Yankees at great cost and having them flop to great embarrassment, scout Al Percolo is banished to scout in Mexico where the standard of baseball is a lot lower – try watching a goat play on third base! However there he finds an American player, Steve Nebraska, who can pitch like the wind and bat like a monster. He drafts him to the Yankees but has to get a physiologist to treat him to ensure he doesn't flop in the same way as the others.I like Albert Brooks. He has never set the world on fire here in the UK but his films can usually be witty and well written if never hilarious. Here however he hits a real bum note with a misguided and unfunny script that he fails to make better in production and delivery. The film starts promisingly enough, with the illusion of being bright and breezy. The introduction of Nebraska appears to deliver more of the same but no – it doesn't. The tone becomes heavier as Nebraska's psyche is probed and I expected it to go deeper. However it does neither. It is never well explained why he is the way he is, or what he's working on – instead he just goes moody. Add to this the usual fun of sports movies is gone but nothing replaces it.The end result is that it is a drag to watch with nothing explaining enough for you to care what's going on. When the sports action does return in the final 10 minutes it is so unlikely (in fact impossible by official rules and biological reason) and badly shot that it adds nothing to the film. It's a shame cause Brooks could have mixed comedy with the deeper issues raised by Nebraska – instead he loses the plot with them both and delivers neither well.Brooks is actually OK but has no real witty lines to deliver after the first 15 minutes. Also, because of a lazy script, he has to become the character that everyone watching will know he shouldn't become – but it sets up the finale…lazy! Fraser is somewhere between playing a goofy guy we love and being `a good actor'™, however here he is just annoying and is neither. Wiest is wasted but it's interesting to see a young Rapaport. Sadly the baseball cameos were wasted on this little Irish lad and I may have missed jokes as a result.Overall this is a wasted chance to mix witty comedy with deeper issues as told through Nebraska. The film starts well but soon the deeper issues suck all the fun out of it but aren't developed well enough to replace them with anything else. Well worth missing.

The Scout is one of those sports movies that gets it right in enough ways to make it watchable, but gets it wrong enough to make you cringe in more spots than you'd like. Brendan Fraser is really terrific as the dopey, wide-eyed innocent of a pitcher who becomes the subject of a massive game of tug of war at first between teams to see who signs him, and then between his love of baseball and his fear of failure. His career has flourished thanks to roles like this, the downy innocent amid a swamp of leaches. This part of the movie is really good. The huge, over-exaggerated bidding war between baseball clubs for his service, it all is real enough to be familiar, and satirical enough to really make fun of and kind of predict baseball's current situation, in which money has become more and more the driving force behind the game. The movie also has a bevvie of terrific cameos like Bret Saberhagen, Keith Hernandez, who oddly seem mistcast as Mets stars in a movie that circles around the Yankees, and of course, a small but prominant role for Yankee owner George Steinbrenner. But in the end all of this winds into a ridiculous debut outing in the first game of the World Series. Let's start with the fact that you can't just join the roster in the World Series. It doesn't work that way. No matter how touted you are, no team will carry a pitcher on their post-season roster (and no, if you're not on that roster the whole way, you cannot join it) who won't pitch unless you get the Series. It doesn't work that way. And his 81 pitch, 81 strike perfect game is ludicrous. I mean completely preposterous. This is a movie that gets so much right in its satire of the game's economics (the Yankees winning the bidding war here is a nice little nod to the current situation where the Yankees are hated throughout the baseball world for their tossing around of money as if it were the fake paper stuff you get with a Monopoly board) and gets so much wrong in the baseball sense. In how good Steve Nebraska (Fraser) is, all sense of realism is throw horribly out the window, and the movie becomes little more than a silly baseball movie. As a Yankee fan, and a fan of the game itself, i expect better of a baseball movie.