Main cast: Kevin Costner (Billy Chapel), Kelly Preston (Jane Aubrey), John C Reilly (Gus Sinski), Brian Cox (Gary Wheeler), and JK Simmons (Frank Perry)
Director: Sam Raimi

Talk about uninspired, by-the-book yawn-inducing. For Love of the Game has me snoozing thirty minutes down the road because the plot is everything I’ve read in a bad Silhouette Desire romance novel, plus many big misunderstandings thrown in. It has a boy trapped in a man’s body as the hero and an insecure, dithering nitwit of a heroine. I guess she’s telling the truth when she says she’d dump him when he’s a disfigured and amputated (they can still be friends). Yawn.

Billy Chapel is a former baseball prodigy who is 40 and is way over the hill. His team is being sold, he is being traded off, and Jane is dumping him for a better job (she says he’s perfect and doesn’t need an insecure wimp like her).

He drinks a lot, experiences flashback about how they meet, how they go through him almost losing his hand, and other gag-inducing Nicholas Sparks novel moments, and I’m off to dreamland dreaming of a gigantic Barney the Purple Dinosaur flattening the whole set of this boring movie.

Kevin Costner is definitely the poster boy of embarrassingly schmaltzy and corny movies. Bull Durham and Tin Cup must be one-off (okay, two-off) brilliant shots by this guy. What a waste, for there are a few scenes in For Love of the Game that shows how lovably roguish he can be. But thanks to the lifeless script, everything goes right into Cosmopolitan territory.