Average Game, Good Players

Trouble with the curve

DIRECTOR: Robert Lorenz

CAST: Clint Eastwood, Amy Adams, Justin Timberlake, John Goodman

***

There is nothing really original regarding this story about Gus, an ageing baseball scout who's losing his eyesight (Eastwood); Mickey, his estranged daughter who is rising up in life (Adams); Johnny, a former player who Gus had scouted but who got burned out fast (Timberlake); and Pete (Goodman), Gus's friend who still trusts his old ways.

From "stupid" computers replacing "good old instincts" and youth playing down experience, to newfangled vegan diets replacing sinful hamburgers and fancy treadmills taking over a simple game in the park — Trouble with the Curve hardly leaves any well-worn cliche alone. It also treats the Gus-Mickey relationship with broad strokes and takes it to an even more stretched but inevitable reunification, over a poor boy winning big no less.

However, Lorenz, an old associate of Eastwood, is lucky in having the latter as the father and Adams as the daughter, if not Timberlake as the eye candy. Plus, he works with a story that shows genuine care for the game at the most basic level. Eastwood is as painfully grizzly as grizzly can get while Adams once again surprises in how well she moulds herself into a role. Here, she is a nicely filled-out 33-year-old with not-so-great hair, good-looking but down-to-earth. A woman who is on her way to becoming the youngest partner in a law firm but who enjoys as much her time out in the sun in the "cheap seats" looking at a baseball game and feasting on hotdogs — and looking the part. SL

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