Sandlot (1993)

            The storyline is all about baseball and the target for this film are those boys about six to ten years old, maybe some girls and all the adults who want to hang out with their kids or just vegetate after a hard day's work.  The level of acting is puerile and reminiscent of Our Gang, vintage 1920s-30s-40s. 

The plot begins when a new wimpy kid, Scotty Smalls (who is small of course), moves into the neighborhood and wants inclusion in the sandlot baseball games, but is initially rejected.  He meets Benjamin Franklin Rodriguez who is foreshadowed as an important character, which is true throughout the story and also at the end.  James Earl Jones has a cameo at the end as Mr. Mertle who owns a dog, "The Beast," the nemesis of the sandlot team.

Like the old Our Gang series, the kid's reactions are overemphasized and events are blown out of proportion.  Some of this is valid and reflects the dramatization added to life by a kid's imagination.  However the screenplay keeps repeating these outbursts so many times, they loose their impact.  The few adults involved are depicted as caricatures, so, with the exception of Mr. Mertle, there's no grownup believability.

With some additional work, subtlety rather than hammer blows and attention to dramatic motivation for events, this could have been a much better film.  There is a moral message and some sly coaching in social skills, so it's a step up from those flat format cartoons.

For those interested, Our Gang: The Little Rascals was a series of 220 comedy short films produced from 1922 to 1944 plus one full-length feature called General Spanky that was produced in 1936.  The series was extremely popular and it broke new ground in the cinema industry by casting boys, girls, whites and blacks in the same film.  The series was later syndicated for television in the 1950s with the title, The Little Rascals.

Sandlot 2 (2005) has been released with a new cast of characters although James Lee Jones returns as Mr. Mertle.

Reviewed October 22, 2005                Copyright 2005 Charles T. Markee

Rated PG in other countries, probably due to insulting epithets.