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88After revitalizing baseball movies with "Field of Dreams" and "Bull Durham," he's now three for three with the funny, quirky, rueful, and richly textured For Love of the Game.
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83Goes down like a cool glass of lemonade on a hot day.
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75It is impossible to think of anyone but Costner in this role. His commitment and sincerity are never in doubt.
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75More of a bunt than a home run.
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70Those who have even a small soft spot for baseball's soothing rhythms will be hard-pressed to resist it.
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68None of their efforts can turn this ho-hum, mildly entertaining line-drive single into a solid, explosive home run.
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65A bona fide, no-doubt-about-it love story disguised as a sports movie.
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63It could do without any kind of love story, let alone the one it got.
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60The game is cool to watch, and the love story is assertive enough to hook even the stodgiest ESPN man.
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50Much of this movie seems a crock.
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50This sentimental drama is wildly uneven as it switches between ballpark scenes, which are very involving, and romantic episodes, which are badly overplayed.
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50The real love affair in For Love of the Game is between Costner and himself.
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A piece of baseball fluff...Costner cinema, pure and simple.
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50Tested my own love of the game more than anything since the time Roseanne screeched the national anthem.
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50The weighty themes of loss, regret and abdication of personal responsibility are undermined by the reverential use of baseball as a symbol of mankind's potential for selfless greatness.
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50Costner's determination to avoid change keeps this baseball movie at a low line drive when it might have knocked one into the bleachers.
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50The film's larger, surprisingly mature emotional rhythms are strong enough to pull it through.
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50Costner is as uneven as the storytelling itself, stone cold at moments, shimmeringly real in others.
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40Watching Raimi's visual style and narrative verve flatten out into this pale reiteration of a middle-aged-male weepie is an exercise in modern horror.
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40Plays like an unholy union of "The Natural" and "The Prince of Tides." Too bad...Build a movie as a shrine to baseball and they will come. Suckers!
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40Costner's serious-as-a-heart-attack performance...slowly kills the movie's energy in a gooey morass of forced sincerity.
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40Call it baseball interruptus, or just call it a missed opportunity.
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40Sometimes even a talented lineup produces unexceptional results.
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38It's the most lugubrious and soppy love story in many a moon, a step backward for director Sam Raimi after "A Simple Plan."
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It's "The Postman" on a pitcher's mound.
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30A dreary, humorless affair, with no real feeling for the rhythms of either baseball or love.
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30Costner himself is the doggedly humorless heart and soul (and brains?) of this monumentally maudlin picture.
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30You will simply want to shoot yourself by the third inning.
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30The baseball half of the story just slightly works. ... Nothing in [the other] half of the film works.
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30For the first 100 minutes or so I found this hokey but serviceable; after that my watch became more meaningful than anything I could locate on-screen.
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25This dialogue isn't helped by two actors who look terrific but can barely choke out a word that sounds remotely authentic or spontaneous.
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Positive: 1 out of 4
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Mixed: 2 out of 4
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Negative: 1 out of 4
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