Cru Jones Society

 

Every Wednesday between now and the end of baseball season the Cru Jones Society brings you a new baseball movie examined for both overall entertainment value and treatment of our favorite game. To suggest a film, email us at staff [at] crujonessociety.com. Otherwise, pour yourself an $8 beer, crack some shells, and let’s play ball.

Date Released: July 15, 1994
Box Office Total: $50,236,831
Team Featured: California Angels

“You can’t go through life thinking everyone you meet will one day let you down.” – Angels’ Manager George Knox

Everyone in Angels in the Outfield has been let down by someone or something. Whether it’s management, parents, fellow players, or our government’s weirdo rules pertaining to child welfare, every character has experienced disappointment on a grand scale. Sometimes all that remains is faith, and while we hope that someone’s out there looking over us, very few of us ever get to see their presence first hand.

Plot Synopsis

Roger is a diehard California Angels fan even though they’re a last place team. He lives in the home of a warm body who temporarily takes care of him and a few other kids and comes home one day to find his scumbag father sitting in the living room with papers signing away custody permanently. Roger asks him desperately, “Dad, when can we be a family again?” to which his rat-faced father responds “From where I’m sitting, I’d say when the Angels win the pennant,” before driving away on his motorcycle setting up our overarching premise.

After watching the Angels lose again in absurdly overblown fashion, Roger lays in bed and prays for a family. A single star twinkles in the distance.

The next day at the Angels game, the team prepares for yet another embarrassing loss, and as the pitcher serves up another meatball that will almost certainly result in an extra base hit, two angels descend from the sky and lift outfielder Matthew McConaughey to an unbelievable catch. As young Roger tries to process what happened, another angel materializes out of thin air calling himself “Al” with the help of a stolen umpire cap, and informs Roger that since he asked for help, he and his angel friends are there to oblige. And sure enough, with the score tied, yet one more angel shows up at the plate and helps the big fat catcher bust out of an 0-for-26 slump with a bat exploding homerun.

Of course, no one can see the angels except for Roger, but for lack of any better ideas, and since the Angels won the previous game with the kid’s crazy hallucinations, Angels’ manager George Knox (played by Danny Glover) invites Roger to the next game where Al causes the craziest series of errors this side of a t-ball game where the Angels win yet again. Roger subsequently gets invited to every Angels game the rest of the season as he and his meek friend JP grow closer to George.

And just like every good sports movie, you gotta have a montage (montage!) and the Angels climb the standings with the help of their heavenly cohorts. With one game to go, Roger’s court hearing gets rescheduled for the biggest game of the year. Sadly, Roger’s bum father isn’t a man of his word, and despite the Angels being only one game from the pennant, he gives up custody permanently. When Roger’s little friend JP spills the beans about the real angels to the team’s play-by-play announcer, Manager Knox is forced to either renounce the presence of angels or be fired. Thanks to an impassioned speech by Roger’s temporary foster caregiver about both the real and metaphorical importance of angels, Knox gets a vote of confidence from the team, and the Angels go for the AL West title in the last game of the season.

Al materializes one last time and informs Roger that not only are they not going to help his team today, the team’s resurgent pitcher played by Tony Danza will die in 6 months thanks to years of smoking even though he’s a professional athlete and doesn’t look a day over 35. Okay then.

And wouldn’t you know… the game hangs in the balance and it’s all up to Tony Danza. Will he come through? Do you remember this is a Disney movie? And will George have shed his gruff demeanor from earlier in the movie and improbably adopt Roger and JP? Wait, Disney, you say?

Treatment of Baseball/Quality of Baseball Scenes:

The baseball in this movie is patently ridiculous. Besides the inclusion of overly special effected angels garishly manipulating the outcome of each game, this is cartoon baseball of the highest order. The antics of Bugs Bunny look like the mannerly, bloodless efficiency of Greg Maddux by contrast.

Outfielders crash into each other during the first game, Danny Glover plays George Knox like a somehow even more pissed off version of Lou Piniella that fights with his players and the team’s play-by-play announcer, each pitcher’s windup looks like it’s directly from “The Big Book of Exaggerated Goofy Pitching Windups” and every player immediately files into some sort of stereotype.

In short, everything here is played big and broad, and while normally that annoys the piss out of me, this is more a kids’ movie than any of the others we’ve covered thus far, and I’m thus willing to cut it a bit more slack. If you go into this movie looking for a meditation on the simple elegance of America’s pastime, you’re an idiot. This is a kids’ movie first, sentimentality ploy second, baseball movie distant third.

Two other things I found amusing: 1) According to this movie, the California Angels’ long time rival is the Detroit Tigers. Didn’t realize that. 2) Most unintentionally hilarious/dated line given the reversal of fortune of both teams: “This isn’t Cincinnati, George. No one expects you to win here.”

Annoying Romantic B-Story/Stifling Spouse?

Absolutely none, which is nice. Sure, Roger pines for his dad the entire movie, and George sheds his brusque, weathered façade to reveal a big ol’ soft heart, but that has nothing to do with the type of criteria we initially set here. A suffocating romantic undertow was gratefully absent in this movie, and is one of its winning qualities.

Final Thoughts

I’m of two minds about this movie.

On one hand, I find its “soppy sentimentality” (as Roger Ebert called it) irritating and transparent. As soon as I saw Roger, George, and JP together the first time, I wondered to myself if he’d end up adopting them. I hate being right because it means we’ve just been put through an exercise in formula. That’s never good. I also found there not to be enough Christopher Lloyd, too much Taylor Negron, and an unholy repetition of the line “I see an angel!” It’s seriously like every other line in this movie. It’ll make you crazy.

But on the other hand, let’s go back to when Roger, George, and JP meet for the first time. They pose for a photo together, and thanks to their hilariously dour expressions, both the photographer and JP look at it and say, “Looks like a prison photo.” And when you picture Danny Glover and young Joseph Gordon-Levitt standing together frowning, you understand why that’s funny. It was the best line in the movie.

Furthermore, even though Danny Glover spends virtually the entire movie sounding like Will Arnett playing Gob Bluth, he’s so good you can’t help but come around to him by the end of the movie and secretly hope that he’ll be the one to adopt the kids even though you already know god damn good and well he will because this is Disney. Tony Danza is fun to watch as usual, and you get to see a young Adrien Brody wear a dorky baseball uniform. This movie is filled with little touches that make it virtually impossible to hate.

So, despite its clichés and telegraphed storytelling, parts of Angels in the Outfield make the experience not altogether terrible. You’ll laugh, you’ll smile at the silly angel antics, and you’ll ultimately hope everything works out for everyone. All in all, there are worse ways to spend 90 minutes.

Ruling from the Scorer: Bloop single drops into shallow right.

edagger@crujonessociety.com