Movie Reviews: "Trouble with the Curve"

[JamesG]

Movie Reviews: Trouble with the Curve


Trouble with the Curve isn’t a great Clint Eastwood flick, critics agree, but he certainly gives a more effective performance in it than he did at the Republican National Convention earlier this month.





Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times calls it;

“a superior entertainment, moving down somewhat predictable paths with an authenticity and humanity that appeals.”





Ebert’s cross-town colleague, Michael Phillips at the Chicago Tribune, clearly has mixed feelings about the movie, summed up in the first words of his review in which he describes it as;

“wholly predictable yet serenely enjoyable.”





That’s the conclusion of a number of critics, including Peter Howell of the Toronto Star.

While he finds the plot confusing, he nevertheless concludes that it’s “agreeable entertainment,” and sums up: “Trouble with the Curve is one of those easy-going old-time movies that they say studios don’t make anymore. They still do on occasion, but you need a guy like Clint Eastwood to pull them off.”





And Kyle Smith in the New York Post writes similarly:

“Baseball movies tend to be lyrical, deeply felt, aggressively metaphorical and (consequently) terrible, but Trouble With the Curve has something most others lack: Eastwood’s superb, cruel sense of humor.”





But Rex Reed of the New York Observer comments that the movie amounts to:

“a minor entry, a cinematic footnote, in Eastwood’s career. A star of this caliber has earned the right to an off-day at the movies, but I guess I have come to expect a whole lot more.”





And Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal dismisses the entire production as;

“bush league all the way with an amateurish script that covers its baseball tale from some time warp where audiences still enjoy declamatory acting, mawkish sentiments and wheezy editing.”

-IMDB News