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They say a voiceover is a sure sign of a weak film, but what about a movie with multiple voiceovers in the first few minutes? That's what you get with Summer Catch, the third collaboration between Freddie Prinze, Jr and Matthew Lillard (the fourth - Scooby-Doo - will be out next summer). They're like the Burt Reynolds (an unexplainably popular, blander-than-bland heartthrob) and Dom DeLuise (a guy who people think is funny but really isn't) for the new millennium.
Casting aside his fondness for making only crappy films with three-word titles, Prinze (She's All That, Down To You, Boys and Girls, Head Over Heels) has now ventured into the hitherto unknown realm of making crappy films with two-word titles. Catch is to baseball what The Replacements was to football last year (and, in fact, baseball is to fall 2001 what football was to fall 2000, with Hardball hoping to become this year's Remember the Titans).
Prinze, who is by now completely interchangeable with MTV tool Carson Daly, plays Ryan Dunne, the son of a blue-collar landscaper in Chatham, Massachusetts who is about to embark on his first season of semi-professional baseball. The catch is he's playing for the hometown Chatham A's in the Cape Cod League - a summer league tailored for kids who have just left college in hopes of being chosen by Major League scouts for their own farm teams. So our Ryan has gone from mowing the grass at the local ballpark to mowing down batters with his 95 mph fastball.
But that's not the only mowing Ryan is doing. He's also in a relationship with a rich girl named Tenley Parrish (Jessica Biel, 7th Heaven), who is spending the summer in her family's vacation home in Chatham. Of course, her dad (Bruce Davison, crazy/beautiful) doesn't approve of his daughter hanging around with the boy who cuts the grass. But that hardly matters to Ryan, especially when Tenley's outfits get skimpier and skimpier as Catch progresses.
Of course, Ryan's problematic love life isn't the only thing on his mind. He's got a history of self-destructing on the mound, and his hot temper could cost him an opportunity to perform well at the obligatory Big Game. A's coach John Schiffner (Brian Dennehy, Death of a Salesman) takes a shining to the boy, but I think it has more to do with his plans to gobble Ryan up like a chicken wing, as Dennehy is as big as the Green Monster.
In addition to Prinze's atrocious, half-hearted attempt at a chowdah accent, you'll also be treated to a bunch of subplots involving Ryan's distant relationships with his dad (Fred Ward, Road Trip) and brother (Jason Gedrick, TV's The Beast), countless shots of people enjoying Sam Adams beer, as well as various sexual hijinks involving the other players on the team (including one with Beverly D'Angelo and That '70's Show's Wilmer Valderrama that was lifted right from Bull Durham). The only remotely interesting character is Katie (Zena Grey, Snow Day), Tenley's younger sister who knows a lot about baseball (a la the precocious kids from Titans) and tries to become the team's mascot.
A movie about Katie would have been ten times more fascinating, assuming director Michael Tollin and writer John Gatins wouldn't be involved. This dynamic duo produced 2000 low-point Ready To Rumble, which starred Lillard's spastic doppelganger, David Arquette. One can only imagine Kevin Falls' (Sports Night, The West Wing) sole contribution to the script was the oddly stirring speech given to Ryan by one of his local buddies. It seemed incredibly out of place in a film whose big laughs are centered around men wearing thong underwear.
1:40 - PG-13 for sexual content, language and some drinking
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