Thursday, December 6, 2007

Stealing Home


Between my love for the game of baseball and my respect for Mark Harmon (NCIS), Stealing Home would look to be a good bet for me. Although the film has the guise of a baseball film, it really tells the story of Billy Wyatt's coming of age. Mark Harmon plays the older version of Wyatt who is called back to his home town after his first love kills herself. Wyatt has become a washed out explayer who has seen all of his dreams fade away. As Wyatt makes his journey homeward, we are told the story of Billy and Katie (Jodie Foster) with William McNamara as the young version of Billy.


What follows is pretty much the standard coming of age tale with a young Jonathan Silverman playing Billy's best friend. Katie starts out as Billy's babysitter, but the bond between them grows much stronger after a tragic event.


Cliche after cliche follows with cheesy 80's music with a large dose of saxophone tries to set the romance between the two leads. You never really get the sense of the special relationship they shared thanks to fairly stock dialogue and one dimensional characters. Even the name itself Stealing Home comes from an event that seems relatively unimportant in the story.


That being said, I still liked it a bit with much thanks to Mark Harmon. The last twenty minutes saves the day as Harmon is reunited with his best friend played as an adult by Harold Ramis (Egon from Ghostbusters). Stealing Home is by no means a great a movie... it was one of those films where it bugs me that lots of things could've been done better. A deeply flawed film that gets a mild recommendation.


60/100

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