Jul 17 2008
Major League: Comedy Hits Home Run
Major League (1989) is about baseball, but it’s a comedy for everyone. The Cleveland Indians have a new owner, Rachel Phelps (Margaret Whitten), and she wants to move the team to Miami, but in order to do so, she needs to show marked decline in attendance, so she fires most of the regular players and invites a bunch of has-been and never-was players to training camp in the hopes of building a losing team.
Jake Taylor (Tom Berenger) is a washed-up catcher with bad knees, Roger Dorn (Corbin Bernsen) is the pretty-boy third baseman, Rick Vaughn (Charlie Sheen) is a hot-headed “wild thing” pitcher, and Willie Mays Hayes (Wesley Snipes) is a scene and base stealing centerfielder who can’t hit to save his life.
The films follows this rag-tag team from Spring Training through the regular season. Rene Russo plays Jake’s ex-girlfriend, Lynn Wells.
Major League, which was written and directed by David S. Ward, is not a classic baseball film in the vein of, say, Bull Durham, but it is a great little comedy that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
On the comparison scale, if Bull Durham (1988) is akin to Beverly Hills Cop (1984), then Major League is akin to Police Academy (1984). All are funny films, it just depends what kind of humor you prefer.
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