Moneyball

MONEYBALL is a very good example of what happens when you combine hype and the interesting story syndrome. For, MONEYBALL features the story of something pretty awesome: the realization that statistics can predict how good a baseball player is, and the utilization of that medium in creating a great baseball team. However, just because this is an interesting story, doesn't mean that MONEYBALL is very good. Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane here, the general manager of the Oakland A's, who have just lost their three best players to other teams. Beane is distraught, but doesn't listen to the advice of his usually trusted scouts. Rather, by chance, he runs into a young kid out of Yale Economics (Jonah Hill) who has some radical ideas about baseball. The entire film consists of Beane's reluctance to go with the statistics idea, and then some of the payoff that results from him trusting it. There are some cool sequences, but this is a film that is supposed to be good based purely on the hype around it. 1) It stars Brad Pitt, but he's not particularly revelatory in his role. 2) The script was written by Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the great SOCIAL NETWORK, but his writing specifically fit David Fincher's vision in SOCIAL NETWORK, and here, his writing just flounders and unrealistic in a realistic film. 3) There isn't anything exciting about the filmmaking in MONEYBALL, its just the events within the film that appear interesting. (Just because a film tells you of one interesting thing, doesn't mean that the film has the power of being innately interesting). Still, MONEYBALL is competent and decent entertainment, but as a supposed piece of "serious" art, it's just not that great, and occasionally it's self-important, overlong, and pretentious.

Moneyball: ★★1/2