Movie review: Million Dollar Arm
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
[Grade: C] Based on the true story of sports agent J.B. Bernstein’s attempts to work Indian players into Major League Baseball, Disney’s Million Dollar Arm successfully avoids going deep.
City Paper grade: C
Based on the true story of sports agent J.B. Bernstein’s attempts to work Indian players into Major League Baseball, Disney’s Million Dollar Arm successfully avoids going deep, toeing the mound so lightly the dirt’s left undisturbed. But Tom McCarthy’s script still allows for plenty of stranger-in-strange-land moments designed to show us how silly foreign countries are in comparison to super-awesome America. Unsuccessfully hunting for his next big client, Bernstein (Jon Hamm) has a lightbulb moment as he watches a televised cricket match — could the bowlers from that sport, wildly popular around the world but little-loved stateside, be converted into starting pitchers? After securing funding, the agent and his crankypants scout (Alan Arkin) embark on a whistle-stop tour of the Indian subcontinent, hunting for boys who can hurl balls in the upper 80s. By the time finalists Rinku and Dinesh (Suraj Sharma and Madhur Mittal) make it to Bernstein’s pad in SoCal, we’ve already been subjected to enough lazy, clumsy South Asian generalizations to fill out two sequels. Their government is corrupt! It’s dirty and noisy! The food makes you queasy! They pray to funny-looking shrines! You crazy Indians, what the heck are we gonna do with you guys? Sharma and Mittal, both promising young actors, do the best they can with the material they’re given, but no one bothers to meet them halfway.
