Major League

Ward directs his actors as adroitly as he has written for them, and the vulnerability that he allows his three stars to reveal is really what makes the movie work. No one, not even baseball fans, should go to Major League hoping for "Bull Durham's" sex, raunch and sophistication. But "Major League" has its own ingratiating charm. Read full review

Major League lacks the subtlety of Bull Durham or the drama of Eight Men Out, but for sheer crowd-pleasing fun it belts one high into the left-field bleachers...Though the plot turns are mostly predictable, they are executed with wit and style. Read full review

Comedy is the lasting virtue here—and more specifically what veteran screenwriter Ward (The Sting, Sleepless in Seattle) got out of a solid comic framework to make Major League continue to work beyond its odd collection of characters and a very specific setting. Read full review

Major League is a movie that knows what it's up to. It skims along agreeable surfaces, expertly balancing its comedy with melodrama and fulfilling expectations right on schedule. As a movie, it`s a superior industrial product. Read full review

There is nothing wrong with grade-A prime aged Angus beef, but sometimes all you really want is a McDonald’s hamburger. “Major League” is the quarter pounder with cheese of baseball movies. There’s nothing original about it, all the characters are stolen from other books or movies, but it understands the longings of a starved baseball town, and manages to wring out plenty of laughs from familiar situations. Read full review

Major League doesn't try too hard or aim too high, but it is pretty funny. With its stock characters, breezy dialogue, dense ambience and instinct for easy emotions, it could serve as the pilot for a pay-cable sitcom. The film's tone is acerb, but its climax is as predictably uplifting as Rocky's and as surefire effective as Damn Yankees'. Read full review

Like so much of the film it's a daft but not too daft proposition; and what redeems it is that the action sequences are superbly filmed, climaxing with Sheen's bullish entry into the arena at make-or-break time, the crowd singing 'Wild Thing' in clamouring unison. Read full review

Ward does manage to pump the film with tension in the climactic, will-the-Indians-beat-the-Yankees sequence, and I found Major League hard to resist in its last 20 minutes or so -- even though it's sappy enough to make Levinson's prettifying of The Natural seem positively dour by contrast. Maybe it's just the season. [7 Apr 1989, p.1]

If you're looking for sophisticated wit keep going, but Major League is pleasant, undemanding fun and the most likely of the baseball movies to hit over here. You don't need to know what they're doing on the field, there are some amusing supporting performances, and everybody likes to see losers make a dream come true. Read full review

Major League trots out the standard formula, but has the wit to make fun of it now and then. The film is so loopy that it glides over its cliches and indulges in some congenial movie-baseball silliness. Read full review

Somebody should tell Ward that winning isn't everything. Character is. And this is what his movie lacks. Read full review

Unfortunately, much of this lineup turns out to be a carbon copy of the "Bull Durham" lineup. We have the wild young fireballer (Charlie Sheen); the veteran catcher (Tom Berenger); the veteran catcher's veteran girlfriend who also happens to be a baseball expert ('You ought to open your stance a little - they're pitching you inside"); and, the superstitious Cuban who sacrifices chickens, kisses snakes and lists his religion as "voodoo."

Not only is this comedy no Bull Durham, it's just plain bull. [7 Apr 1989, p.6D]

Major League is shamelessly formulaic. At the beginning, when it uses Randy Newman's ironic ode to Cleveland ("City of light, city of magic"), the movie has a lovely tone, and briefly, you feel a surge of anticipation, as if the people making it might actually have an original point of view or some feel for the game. All hope is dashed, though, early on, when you realize that they are cannibalizing every other baseball movie. (Newman wrote the music for "The Natural.") This is movie-making by rip-off. Read full review

But this movie is no more interested in Cleveland than it is, really, in baseball: It doesn't have the passion for the sport's curiosities that Bull Durham has, nor the feeling for the sport's heartbreak of Eight Men Out. Watching Major League may be better than watching no baseball at all. But its place in the annals of baseball-moviedom is bush league at best. Read full review