Million Dollar Arm Jon Hamm, Suraj Sharma, Madhur Mittal. Directed by Craig Gillespie. Rated PG. Opens Friday.
The true story that inspired Million Dollar Arm is pretty fascinating: Sports agent J.B. Bernstein, in need of new clients, decided to head to the untapped market of India, where he staged a talent contest to find the next great pitcher for Major League Baseball. Two players that Bernstein discovered in 2008, Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel, went on to have MLB careers. It’s perfect fodder for an ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, and it also turns out to be perfect fodder for a Disney feel-good sports movie.
The movie is split into two distinct halves, with Bernstein (Jon Hamm) first traveling to India to find his new superstars, and then Singh and Patel traveling to the U.S. to train for a Major League tryout. The laid-back travelogue of the first half is much stronger than the second half, which focuses on predictable sentimentality, complete with a rote romantic subplot between Bernstein and his neighbor (Lake Bell). As played by Suraj Sharma and Madhur Mittal, Singh and Patel aren’t quite fully developed characters, and the story falls back on sports-movie clichés instead of exploring the more complicated questions raised by Bernstein’s project. In its efforts to inspire, the true story eventually comes off as phony.
