Blu-ray Movie Reviews

Disney Blu-ray Disc Movie ••• Picture •••• Sound ••• Extras •••

Sony DVD Movie •• Picture ••• Sound ••• Extras ••½

"Take me out to the ball game," indeed. In spite of our computer culture, baseball is still one of the nation's most popular pastimes. And when it comes to baseball movies, most can be enjoyed by people who don't play or watch the sport. And once in a while, we get a masterpiece, such as Field of Dreams.

Alas, that's not what we get in either The Rookie or The Final Season. The former is the true story of Jim Morris, a high-school coach who became the oldest rookie in the Major Leagues. The latter movie is another true story, about a high school's last season before being incorporated into a larger district. And both films are rife with cliché. The Final Season may begin in a Dreams-like cornfield, but that's just a harbinger of the corny lines and trite homilies you'll experience over the next 2 hours. Just about every stock ploy seen in other sports movies is driven into the ground in this film, and none of them too well acted.

But with The Rookie, there's a difference, and his name is Dennis Quaid. He so becomes Morris, turning in such a nuanced characterization, that he raises the level of this rather ordinary film up a notch, maybe two. The rest of the cast catches his enthusiasm, and director John Lee Hancock seems to do nothing but encourage them.

If only director David Mickey Evans had done the same for his actors in The Final Season. Watching it, I started to single out the curiously lackluster turn by Powers Boothe as a coach - but then I realized that all of the performances are bland, with the actors seeming to be uninvolved. So I must blame Evans, as well as his screenwriter, Art D'Alessandro.

On the other hand, the ballgame sequences in Season come across as very real, and they're taut and exciting. The ultimate cliché - the big final game that will make or break everyone - is actually quite thrilling. One of the commentaries is by the real-life coaches, and they talk baseball and ignore the rest of the plot. The ballgame scenes are good in The Rookie, too (though they focus primarily on pitching), and they work with the dramatic scenes in a complementary manner, avoiding the jolting unevenness of Season.

The Rookie also has the benefit of being available on Blu-ray Disc. So it's not surprising that the picture here - with excellent detail and very natural color - is better than that of Season on standard DVD, which seems a bit coarse at times, even if the color is rich in a "Kodak family portrait" way. Sonically, both discs disappoint in not using the surround channels to the max. In a sports movie, the overall sound field should place you inside the scene - as it does with a film like Remember the Titans. But though the sound here is clean and well balanced up front (with The Rookie in uncompressed PCM), both of these movies left me outside of the action.

The Rookie includes a commentary by Quaid and Hancock, a passel of deleted scenes with introductions by the director, and a short biopic on the real Morris. The Final Season, in addition to its two commentaries, has three ordinary making-of clips and an uninvolved featurette on the real events.