The Rookie Review
Stylish and well-crafted, this sports melodrama doesn't offer up much that is new in its oft-clichéd milieu, but the well-traveled paths down which it trods are reliable ones. If not for the film's badly distended running time it might have ended up, despite its lack of originality, in a genuinely affecting place. It's too bad that director John_Lee_Hancock and screenwriter Mike_Rich don't get that their project is fundamentally G-rated schmaltz that's been road-tested and sanitized for Middle American bourgeois viewing. There's nothing wrong with candy corn cinema when it's self-aware, but the filmmakers seem to be laboring under the delusion that they're crafting a 21st century Field of Dreams (1989) instead of the latest family-friendly Disney concoction. The bloated two-hours-plus length betrays their pretensions, with nearly every scene slogging on long past the point where it should have been cut. The Rookie is definitely not a bad film; it benefits from its factual origins enough that the third-act payoff is genuinely affecting, and the performance by Dennis_Quaid is thankfully free of irony or self-pity. It's just that the art of editing at either the script or at the final cut stage could have helped tremendously to disguise the artificiality that's being employed to manipulate viewers. Karl Williams, Rovi
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