Metacritic Film

Summer Catch

Starring Freddie Prinze Jr., Jessica Biel, Matthew Lillard, Fred Ward, Jason Gedrick, Bruce Davison, Brian Dennehy, and Brittany Murphy

MPAA RATING: PG-13 for sexual content, language and some drinking

Warner Bros.
Romance
minutes | Color
USA
Released In Theaters August 24, 2001

While pursuing his dream of becoming a major league baseball player, a working class boy (Prinze) falls for a wealthy girl (Biel) vacationing with her parents on Cape Cod.

WRITTEN BY
Kevin Falls (also story)
John Gatins

DIRECTED BY
Michael Tollin

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

21 / 100

Critic Reviews

63 Charlotte Observer Kevin Baxter
It's no surprise, and it's trite, but sometimes fun -- and not magic -- is more than enough.
50 Baltimore Sun Staff (Not credited)
A fuzzy, feel-good movie about baseball, babes and believing in yourself.
50 Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
Fuzzy, feel-good movie about baseball, babes and believing in yourself.
50 Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas
Under Michael Tollin's direction, Prinze does well in what is surely the most complex character he has played on the screen.
50 Variety Joe Leydon
Haphazard mix of boisterously crude comedy, romantic entanglements, class-conscious clashes and intensely competitive hardball.
50 Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
Freddie Prinze Jr. has a look in his eye that is equal parts self-infatuation and boyish flash of fear.
40 TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
A lifelong baseball enthusiast, director and co-producer Mike Tollin -- persuaded many real-life baseball figures to make cameo appearances.
40 Mr. Showbiz Cody Clark
Whenever we're not at the ballpark, the film falls back on teenage relationship clichés. That's most of what's wrong with it, actually.
38 USA Today Claudia Puig
Too bad the movie didn't take its own advice and risk coming up with a fresh story.
38 Boston Globe Jay Carr
The screenplay, with its relentlessly schematic characters saying relentlessly schematic things, is so moronic that it makes you long for a documentary on the real Cape League.
38 Chicago Tribune Robert K. Elder
Neither drama nor comedy, Summer Catch is a long, slow lob of a movie that never crosses the plate.
30 LA Weekly Chuck Wilson
To help Prinze sail past the eventually unbearable clichés of Kevin Falls and John Gatins' script, director Mike Tollin has assembled an impressive supporting cast.
30 Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
Prinze, Lillard, and Biel are all pleasant enough to look at, but the film's Romeo and Juliet tropes are shopworn by now, and the movie gives us nothing else.
30 Washington Post Desson Thomson
Uninspired baseball romance.
25 Seattle Post-Intelligencer Paula Nechak
Tries mightily to have the charm of "Bull Durham," but instead fields raunchy sex jokes, predictable story line, dumb dialogue and a lackluster love affair.
25 New York Daily News Jami Bernard
It's a movie that should have been called on account of boredom.
20 Washington Post Rita Kempley
A trite, bantamweight "Bull Durham," hasn't a single line, gibe, gesture or twist that hasn't already been chewed up and spat out in many a movie baseball dugout.
20 Chicago Reader Lisa Alspector
Awful light drama.
12 New York Post Jonathan Foreman
Summer Catch is the sludge at the bottom of the barrel.
10 Village Voice Michael Atkinson
Can only be enjoyed with a skullful of Old Bohemian and a faceful of high school crotch.
10 The New York Times Lawrence Van Gelder
A mound of standard-issue parent-child conflicts and enough self-help cliches to drive Polonius to the aquavit barrel at Elsinore.
10 New Times (L.A.) Andy Klein
Given how uninvolving Summer Catch is, the truly remarkable pitching here was not so much on the mound as in the executive office where someone convinced Warner Bros. to green-light this turkey, which should have been called Good Will Hitting.
10 Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Filming this mess in North Carolina (strike three).
0 Portland Oregonian Chris Hewitt
Apparently, you can lead a Prinze to a movie, but you can't make him act.
0 San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
The equivalent of a full-course meal with no calories. It is a mirage of a movie, 100 minutes of nothing.

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