Major League (1989)

Ward directs his actors as adroitly as he has written for them, and the vulnerability that he allows his three stars to reveal is really what makes the movie work. No one, not even baseball fans, should go to Major League hoping for "Bull Durham's" sex, raunch and sophistication. But "Major League" has its own ingratiating charm.

Major League lacks the subtlety of Bull Durham or the drama of Eight Men Out, but for sheer crowd-pleasing fun it belts one high into the left-field bleachers...Though the plot turns are mostly predictable, they are executed with wit and style.

Comedy is the lasting virtue here—and more specifically what veteran screenwriter Ward (The Sting, Sleepless in Seattle) got out of a solid comic framework to make Major League continue to work beyond its odd collection of characters and a very specific setting.

Major League is a movie that knows what it's up to. It skims along agreeable surfaces, expertly balancing its comedy with melodrama and fulfilling expectations right on schedule. As a movie, it`s a superior industrial product.

There is nothing wrong with grade-A prime aged Angus beef, but sometimes all you really want is a McDonald’s hamburger. “Major League” is the quarter pounder with cheese of baseball movies. There’s nothing original about it, all the characters are stolen from other books or movies, but it understands the longings of a starved baseball town, and manages to wring out plenty of laughs from familiar situations.