Flak Magazine: Review of Mr. 3000, 10.01.04

It's easy to see why Hollywood keeps churning out sports movies. They pack a huge ready-made appeal to the coveted young-male audience and they provide a clear quest for the hero, an unambiguous goal that even the laziest viewer can grasp immediately. Also, before the big questions are answered (Will he win the big one? Will he get the girl?), there's a lot of opportunity for minor crises, small plot points that gradually ratchet up the action, things like: Will he make the team, find acceptance, learn humility, escape the slump, reject the tempter? There's probably a Final Draft software plug-in that lays it all out for you, complete with pulldown menu at pages 15, 30, 60, 90 and 120: "He gets a touchdown/hit/hole-in-one/knockout/other."

It's not so easy to write a good sports movie. (The Coen Brothers made a great film, Barton Fink, about the ruination of a highbrow writer trying to hack out a formula "wrestling picture.") A good one nearly always turns the genre on its side, letting the hero flail or even fail. Otherwise you get pompous bogosity like The Natural, replete with a pyrotechnic climax and misty-eyed girl in the cheap seats. The great sports films deliberately keep the stakes low. In Bull Durham, the quest is for minor league home runs; likewise, Slap Shot is about minor league hockey. North Dallas Forty finds its hero trying for a few last fine moments on the field, and the most recent "great," Bring It On, is about cheerleading.

Smartly, the writers of Mr. 3000 (Eric Champnella, Keith Mitchell and Howard Gold) set themselves and their hero a nice small assignment and so succeed nicely. Of course, it helps to have some real players on your team, like director Charles Stone III and stars Bernie Mac (in his first lead role) and Angela Bassett. Stone directed the amazing Drumline, and is right at home in the coliseum-sized universe. More tellingly, he directed "True," a miniscule short that spawned the Budweiser campaign ("Wassup!") by hilariously capturing the subverbal essence of guyness. His keen eye informs Mr. 3000, hallowing a baseball stadium as a sort of symphony in steel. He makes a pre-game stretch into ballet and trims every emotional moment perfectly, never letting it linger into mawkishness.

Bernie Mac is Stan Ross, a Milwaukee Brewer who hits his 3,000th hit during a pennant race and instantly retires after snatching the souvenir ball away from the kid who catches it. He opens a mini-mall with 3,000-themed businesses (e.g. 3000 Woks) and hangs out at its Mr. 3000 Lounge with Boca (Michael Rispoli), a lukewarm friend from his playing days. When, nine years later, they retire Stan's number, the colleagues' "eulogies" are withering, leaving no doubt that he had always been a selfish, albeit talented, jerk. Stan has an image problem, which may thwart his ultimate quest for induction to the Hall of Fame. He tries to make amends with a photo op at a kids reading program ("Reading Iz Dope") but he interrupts the story to take a call, and his world collapses: Baseball's statisticians have discovered an error; he only has 2,997 hits. The scene has definite echoes of President Bush's "My Pet Goat" moment in Fahrenheit 9/11, but in this version Stan doesn't worry about scaring the children, or even the adults in the room. Naturally, this material is right in Bernie Mac's sweet spot — Fox has built a fine sitcom for Mac around just this gentle menace.

Stan decides to make a comeback, get his three hits and retire again. Fortunately, the Brewers are so desperate to put people in the seats they agree to take him back. There are predictable jokes and sight gags about the old man shaping up — "Grandpa" getting the business from his twentysomething teammates. Mac manages to liven up even this stuff, gamely immersing himself in the pathetic. Then Stan's old flame Mo (Angela Bassett) comes to town, covering his comeback for ESPN, and the film switches gears. Back in the day Mo was a party-girl and a player, but now she's sober and focused. She realizes age is soon going to take her out of the glamcaster game (although she looks way too great here to be convincingly worried), and so she's trying to get behind the camera as a producer. Stan is different now, too — quickly and seriously smitten — but the tables have turned. Mo is happy to get together with Stan for some of that old sexual chemistry, but, in some of the film's funniest moments, she gives him the proverbial Heisman when he tries to get serious.

Basset and Mac throw believable sparks, showing us what Mo pays to keep Stan at distance, and how baffled and deeply sad it makes him. (He glumly tells her "I have a headache," one night when she announces she won't stay until morning.) Their dialogue is especially fine. They talk about sex like the real adults who've been around but still have something sweet for one another. Both actors show real depth, often simply suggesting that very difficult thing, a deeply conflicted heart. Their romance is deft, subtle and deliciously watchable, but it doesn't swamp Stan's quest for statistical redemption, it intersects perfectly with it.

Scores of real-world sportsyakkers turn up to comment on Stan's comeback. Tom Arnold, Jay Leno, Tony Kornheiser, Larry King and many more have some fun at his expense. It gives the story a slight metafictional spin, bouncing between blatant product placement and mockumentary. Stone sometimes seems to be showing how seamlessly the surreal world of pro sports and fiction film can mesh. His thoroughly postmodern Brewers see the game first as show biz, and that, he lightly implies, might be part of their problem. (On the bench, the team's Odd Couple bicker about soap opera trivia instead of watching the contest.) They're so used to being commodified that they're anxious to be digitally miniaturized and boxed up in video games — it's no wonder they can't coalesce as a team.

There's surprisingly little actual baseball in the movie. We get some excellent batter's-eye-view shots of the pitches, and just enough action to put us at a game, but mostly we're watching the players in the dugout, or hearing about the plays from announcers. There's no super-slow-motion base rounding or diving catches. You could almost see this story as a stage play, with all the on-field action coming through a choric radio on the kitchen table. Still, when Stan's big moment, his big choice, comes (as of course it must) in the last act, you understand it viscerally, in the context of his career, his romance and the team's season. And when it's all over, he's still in a fully adult world of hurt, neither wholly liberated nor satisfied with his difficult decision. Best of all, Stone lets the action speak for itself; he doesn't let the characters give it a treacly post-mortem. It happens, it's over; then there's just time enough for a few really good jokes on the way out the door.

Mr. 3000 doesn't hit it out of the park. There are few moments of explosive hilarity, and few will be moved to tears by the "touching" parts. But nobody here seems to be over-reaching or straining, and by stringing together a lot of slight, genuine surprises, the film succeeds. Sometimes "small ball" is what gets the job done.

— David Essex (djessex@earthlink.net)