‘Million Dollar Arm’ Review: An Unfunny, Cold Sports Tale

Million Dollar Arm tells the story of the Million Dollar Arm contest, started by sports agent J.B. Bernstein in order to fund his failing athlete management company. The premise of the contest is to go to India, and find the MLB’s first Indian player out of a crop of cricket players. Instead, he finds two boys who know barely anything about either sport, and has a few months to turn them into pitching superstars. Let the hilarity and feels ensue.

But the laughs never come, and there are no feels. There are a lot of one liner jokes dealing with the “privileged American thrown into India” trope, but they’ve already been done (more successfully) a few years ago on the NBC show Outsourced. Frankly, all of the jokes in the film seemed forced, and are designed to just get laughter out of the audience with as little effort as possible.

I won’t spoil the ending, but since it’s a Disney movie, there is an extremely clear moral to the story that causes the characters to change. However, just like the jokes, the changes the characters go through feel just as forced as the jokes. Think of any great sports movie, and imagine the emotions it makes you feel, how they encourage you to follow your dreams. There is none of that here.

Anybody who knows the real life story of the Million Dollar Arm contest knows from the get go what’s going to happen later on in the film. And even if you don’t, you can figure it out within five minutes. While the source material isn’t the most surprising story in the world, the film makes no attempt to surprise you. If you’ve seen a few movies before, you could probably just watch the first ten minutes and then summarize the whole film.

While the film intends to be a good flick for the entire family to watch, it just turns out to be a mediocre one at that. It’s ironic that this is a story about a contest designed to make money off of two boys who came from nothing, because the movie itself is designed to make money off of the story about two boys who came from nothing. It lacks substance, feeling, and does the least amount possible to get the dollars from your wallet.