Moneyball

There’s no such thing as a bad sports movie. Even the worst sports movie is still pretty good. Watching sports is exciting, it has inherent built in conflict. Add the drama and theatrics of movie making and its hard not to make a great movie that’s the best of both worlds. Sports movies take two things and make something greater than the sum of its parts. It’s like that old candy slogan, “two great tastes that taste great together.” So based on that fact the movie “Moneyball,” should be great. Except for one thing, this isn’t really a sports movie. It’s just straight forward drama that happens to take place in the world of sports.

“Moneyball,” is about a new economical and statistical approach to the game of baseball called sabermetrics. But really it’s about the general manager of the struggling Oakland A’s. If it sounds boring to you, well then you’d be absolutely right. It’s not like “Patton,” where you finally got to see a war film from the perspective of the man in charge. Turns out the day to day business affairs of a sports club aren’t that interesting. This movie is incredibly boring and deliberately slow paced. And that’s fine in a drama, but runs contrary to the structure of a sports movie. The acting is fine, and the story is interesting enough to a certain degree, but there are a million ways to make this movie more compelling which were never utilized. Not to mention, this movie could have been a half an hour shorter and lost nothing.

There are funny parts to this movie courtesy of Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, but it is just… so… slow… Usually, any movie based on a true story is more interesting because of three things: First, the mere fact that you know its true makes it somehow more incredible, fascinating and unbelievable. Second, the minutia and specificity make it generally more intriguing and original. And third, when something is true it usually doesn’t fit well into standard Hollywood story structure and therefore has unexpected twists, turns, and outcomes. But sadly that wasn’t enough to turn a fairly ordinary drama into a bona fide sports movie.