Major League

1989 baseball comedy

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Like Slap Stick only with baseball and no Paul Newman. The owner of the Cleveland Indians throws together the worst collection of players she can find in order to come in last place and enable her to move the team to Miami. This was pre-Marlins, by the way.

This could have been much better and would have been much worse if Bob Uecker wouldn't have come along when the movie was starting to lose some steam and saved things. Pretty much everything he says in this is funny, and Major League Baseball should actually put him in the Hall of Fame a second time just for his appearance in this movie. James Gammon is also funny and brings the perfect voice for the team's manager. The other characters are hit and miss. The characters played by Dennis Haysbert (not easy to recognize), Charles Cyphers, and Corbin Bernsen are really just there for one joke, but the writers definitely do their best to get the most mileage out of those single jokes. Wesley Snipes is a little rounder as the terrifically-named Willie Mays Hayes, and Charlie Sheen's character has a little depth even though Sheen himself only seems to have a single facial expression. The best thing about them is that they all pass as baseball players. When baseball wasn't happening, the relationship between Berenger and Russo was, and I just didn't care about that subplot at all. I guess you have to try to bring the gals along somehow though, right? This has plenty of funny lines ("This guy here is dead!", "Look at this fucking guy.", "I look like a banker in this.", "He was a juvenile delinquent in the off-season.", "Yellowstone?", "Vaseline ball hit to short."), but nothing is quite as funny as that ridiculous mascot that the Cleveland Indians are still allowed to have--the offensively-grinning Chief Wahoo. Oh, and this starts with a Randy Newman song, and Randy Newman songs make everything better. His particular brand of irony really complements the Cleveland imagery during the opening credits.