At this point of the month, I am running out of baseball movies to watch on PureFlix. Today’s selection was Every Boy Needs a Hero. To be quite honest, I was somewhat disengaged with this movie, then the final game pushed me over the edge with anger.
If you understand anything about baseball, you know that when a team bats each inning, they get three outs. Trailing 7-5 in the bottom of the ninth inning, The Gappers (the yellow team in the poster) came up to bat. The first kid got a hit and reached first base safely. The next batter then hit a line drive into left field. Both hitters were safe at first and second. Then the next batter came up with “two outs” with the same two runners on base. How on earth did the writers mess this up?!? I totally understand that they wanted to build up the drama with this particular batter, but come on. Keep it real. This magnificent error caused me to not just dislike this movie, but to hate it. You can’t change the rules of the game to fit your feel-good story moment.
This movie had a lot of promise. It wanted to showcase the importance of a father and son relationship. I think it failed on several levels. The fathers in the story don’t express a whole lot of interest in helping the boys with baseball. Their coach has good intentions, but his ego seems to get in the way, including his strained relationship with his own grown son, which conflicts with the operations of this little league team.
What seems unrealistic, is when things don’t go their way, The Gappers try to start their own league. These actions by the coaches really send mixed messages. The point is to show unity and that through strong relationships, the boys, can overcome anything. Yet the adults can’t seem to get out of their own to make that happen until the ending, which is meant to send you home happy.
Every Boy Needs a Hero doesn’t have an IMDb page, so I don’t know what that says about the movie and its release market. From the little information I could find about the film, it is supposed to be a great family movie. I’m sure some people see it that way, I didn’t. 1/10
Ten Stars or Less 