The baseball is sloppy and the sentiments border on maudlin in “You Gotta Believe,” the latest “true story” Texas sports dramedy from director Ty Roberts and writer Lane Garrison.
Luke Wilson plays a Little League coach with cancer — he was in Roberts and Garrison’s “12 Mighty Orphans” — in what’s meant to be a plucky account of (what was back in 2002) “The Longest Little League World Series Game Ever Played.”
A good supporting cast includes Greg Kinnear as a fellow coach, and Sarah Gadon and Molly Parker as the coach’s wives, mothers to Little League players called on to “Win One for Coach Bobby” when Coach Ratliff (Wilson) gets a terminal diagnosis.
But everything from the Westside League’s all star team to the games themselves tumbles off a cliff into nonsensical as we march towards that “longest game” through the usual “conditioning” montages and games littered with errors and skinny child actor home runs.
And entrusting mostly inexperienced child actors to play the assorted player “types” on this underdog squad from tiny, remote Fort Worth (ahem) ensures that a sitcom season’s worth of corny punchlines are blown — neither enunciated or delivered with any sense of timing or emphasis.
“Is that a forced error?”
“His old man ‘forced’ him to play.”
OK, that one lands.
Kinnear’s a distracted lawyer-coach Jon and Wilson’s the ever-upbeat Coach Bobby, who is full of “Life’s short, the time is NOW” aphorisms for their inept nine.
We see their bad team lose a game — badly — at the end of a losing season. That in itself is amusing. Their pitcher beans an opposing batter, the ump ejects the pitcher, and calls the inning without anybody on the other team being called out for the BEANBALL on THEIR player. Next think we know, incompetent Westside comes back up to bat.
How do we SCORE that, kids?
Logic dictates that a lousy team with one distracted coach and another enthusiastic one, neither of whom has fathered kids who can play, should be named all star team coaches, with the ability to fill their league’s team with bad players from their own squad, including their kids.
Then screenwriter Garrison and director Roberts skip other steps as this motley crew abruptly plays its way out of their corner of Texas, out of Texas and into Williamsport, PA.
The kids are “types” — the Romeo, the half-blind catcher shifted to one position after another, the coach’s kid they nickname “Rocket” because of how slow he runs the basepaths, the Hispanic kid who is their best player, but works — at 12 — to save for college.
Hey, they need him because this may be the least diverse Little League movie since the Truman administration (I know, Fort Worth).
Parker’s (“Small Crimes,” recently seen n TV’s “Lost in Space”) the wife who won’t let Coach Jon let Coach Bobby down.
“Laughter is like Prozac without side effects.”
Gadon (“Enemy,” TV’s “True Detective”) classes the joint up as the wife who would rather her husband concentrate on treatment.
They and Wilson and Kinnear do what they can with the material. But Roberts and Garrison stumble and fumble through a melodramatic version of real events, one so cut and dried that it should have been easy to render at least tolerable.
One kid speaks for us all when he chirps “What in the name of Willie Mays are you doing now, Coach?”
God only knows.
Rating: PG, tweens brawling, mild profanity
Cast: Luke Wilson, Greg Kinnear, Sarah Gadon, Michael Cash, Etienne Kellichi and Molly Parker.
Credits: Directed by Ty Roberts, scripted by Lane Garrison. A Well Go USA release.
Running time: 1:45
