Why so much hype?

Let's be realistic.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

I'm a big Tony Bennett fan, but the rest of the movie was childish. Did I mention Tony is a class act? Seriously I could find no reason why this obviously American born person would be hiding away, south of the border, the part with him hanging out up in the rafters of the stadium trying to make up his mind to play or not was so frustrating for me, I found myself trying to decide if I wanted to destroy my VCR or not. I felt very uncomfortable for Mr. Bennett in the scene where he was upstaged on his "I Left My Heart In San Francisco" segment of his show. I don't want to seem to harp on this particular part, but it is what stands out in my mind when I think of this film..

I think sometimes people take some movies too seriously, and this is an example of one of them. This is a fantasy baseball movie, not something that would actually happen. Does anyone think that "The Natural" was realistic? Brendan Frasier is great in his role as a child trapped in an adult's body due to an abusive childhood, but who is one of the greatest baseball players ever. Albert Brooks is also great as the scout whose bad luck suddenly changes when he discovers him in the middle of Mexico, and is so excited about his talent that he ignores the mental problems that Frasier's character has. However, Im disappointed we never learned more of what was actually wrong with him.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the movie. I've probably seen it about 10 times, and it never fails to entertain me and give me some good laughs here and there. It's your typical goofy Brendan Frasier comedy, although something tells me that's not what exactly what it was going for. I didn't buy into any of the dramatic elements of the movie... Brendan Frasier's character(his goofy behavior), as well as some of the plot elements made it very hard for me to take the movie completely seriously. The fact that Steve Nebraska (Frasier) was supposedly the "greatest player to ever live" and his ability to strike every batter out with 100+ MPH fastballs and even the ability to hit a home run every time at bat seemed a little ridiculous to me. Also, the conflict that arose towards the middle of the movie (about Nebraska's mysterious past/his family) should have been delved into a little more. But Other than those complaints, I'll say that I enjoyed The Scout for what it was, which was an above average baseball comedy with enough laughs and plenty of entertainment to keep me watching for 2 hours.

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.