The Perfect Game Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.0

The Perfect Game Blu-ray Movie Review

Not perfect, not original in the slightest, but good for what it is.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater August 10, 2011

The inspirational sports movie is definitely a love-it-or-hate-it genre. On the one hand, underdog athletic films are usually uplifting stories about the importance of teamwork, the power of perseverance under adversity, and the honor in doing your best, but on the other, they’re dryly predictable, exceedingly cliche-ridden, and unabashedly sentimental. By now, the conventions are set in stone. You have the rag-tag group of on-the-fringe losers who are either too poor, too weak, or too disorganized to be taken seriously. You have the star player with father issues and the down-and-out coach who will inevitably regain his self-respect. You have the crossfaded training montages set to fist-pumping music, the surprising early wins, and the epic trajectory toward “the big game,” where the scrappy kids prove their mettle, narrowly emerging victorious in the final seconds to become unlikely hometown heroes. Little League humdinger The Perfect Game is yet another movie that follows this formula to the letter. If you teared up watching Hoosiers and The Blind Side made you bawl, The Perfect Game will probably provoke a similarly watery effect. If, however, you’re predisposed to dismissing underdog movies outright, your eyes are likely to do more rolling than crying.

The Little Giants

Unnecessary Spoiler Alert: A perfect game is pitched in The Perfect Game, and you guessed it, this flawless display of one-after-another outs takes place during the big game. The film retells the true story of the kids who came to be called Los Pequeños Gigantes—The Little Giants—a scraggly, overwhelmingly short team from Mexico that stunned everyone by winning the 1957 Little League World Series. They were the first team from outside the U.S. to win the championship, and star pitcher Angel Macias—played here by Jake T. Austin of The Wizards of Waverly Place—threw what is still the only perfect game in Little League World Series history. As in all of these kinds of films, the outcome is a given from the outset, making the real allure the journey the marginalized, underprivileged kids take from being poor nobodies to gaining international recognition and receiving a personal invitation from then-President Eisenhower to visit the White House.

The first act is set south of the border in Monterrey, a dusty wasteland of a town where all the men seem to work in a hulking iron-smelting factory. One of them, depressed alcoholic Cesar Faz (Clifton Collins, Jr.), has recently returned from the U.S. after losing his job with the St. Louis Cardinals organization. I think we’ve found our coach! (We’re initially not told what exactly Cesar did for the Cardinals, but this mystery is revealed later in the game when he’s forced to lose his pride before he can gain it back.) The town’s poor-as-dirt kids play stickball with makeshift equipment--a welder’s helmet is refashioned into a catcher’s mask, leather straps are knotted and looped to make a ball--and listen fervently to Major League games on the radio with jovial Padre Esteban (Cheech Marin, believe it or not), a priest who prays, “these children have nothing, how can I give them hope?” God’s answer seems to come in the form of an honest-to-goodness rawhide-and-stitching baseball that Angel finds outside Cesar’s bottle-strewn, corrugated iron shack. This sparks in the kids a desire to get a team together to compete in the Little League World Series. Padre Esteban approaches Cesar to be the coach, but the embittered alkie responds with what might go down as the most cliched line in the history of underdog sports movies: “It would take a miracle to make these kids into a real team.”

And you know the rest. Miracles, of course, are the stock-in-trade of this particular genre, so we’re not exactly surprised when the team embarks on an epic winning streak under Cesar’s initially reluctant guidance. The kids enter the U.S. on three-day visas, expecting to play a few games, get disqualified, and go home, but they quickly have to file for an extension when the victories keep coming and the team heads from one tournament to the next, rising improbably through the ranks. They face increasingly bigger, tougher, and better trained opponents, but the real obstacle is the racism that greets them in each new town. Turned away from “White Only” washrooms and derided with slurs, the team finds unexpected alliances with two African-Americans who help them out along the way, a sympathetic minister and an old fieldkeeper who used to play in the Negro Leagues. The film’s vision of 1950’s racism is candy-coated and a little simplistic, but this is a sugary, morally uncomplicated motivational movie to begin with, which is understandable given the target pre-teen audience.

If you’ve seen any kid-oriented sports movie before, The Perfect Game will seem unbelievably derivative, but that’s beside the point. For a 9-year-old who’s never watched The Mighty Ducks, let alone The Bad News Bears, the film will be a brand-new inspirational experience, and I suppose that’s what matters most. When judging a film like this I try to look at the execution, not the originality--or lack thereof, more likely--and through this filter, The Perfect Game is decent but not perfect. The acting is mixed. Clifton Collins, Jr. is good as the never- was coach who gets a second shot, and Cheech Marin, who played a decidedly more violent priest in last year’s Machete, is a believably benevolent figure here. Lost’s Emilie de Ravin, however, does an all-too-goofy mid-century American reporter accent, and the young players-- culled from iCarly, Hannah Montana, and the aforementioned Wizards of Waverly Place--are okay but a bit precious at times too. W. William Winokur’s script, based on his own novel, is loaded with over-obvious lines and bereft of subtlety, and Angels in the Outfield director William Dear cheesily tries to evoke 1950s nostalgia by intercutting vintage black and white footage. But here’s the thing; for all of the film’s predictability and sentiment, when Angel pitches the titular perfect game I couldn’t help but burst into a wide, borderline maniacal grin. I love it--and hate it--when that happens.

The Perfect Game Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Perfect Game comes to the big leagues on Blu-ray with a 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer that's probably fairly true-to-source. This isn't a big- budget production, and there are some questionable stylistic choices in the cinematography, but the film otherwise looks as good as can be expected in high definition, with an image that's colorful, suitably sharp, and free of compression/encode problems. As for those stylistic oddities, the credit sequence employs on of the worst ideas I've come across in a while; in an attempt to presumably look both nostalgic and contemporary, the outside of the picture is in black and white, while a feathered interior circle appears in color. It's bizarre and frankly ugly, but thankfully it goes away as soon as the credits are through. There's also a flashback to a funeral that features an over-the-top desaturated look with a pale bluish-gray cast. The color-toning in general is a bit obvious--there's a prevalence of creamy, antiqued highlights--but the picture is at least strong and vivid, with bright Little League reds and blues and crisp grass greens. Black levels are plenty deep and the image has a great sense of contrast. Shot on 35mm, the film retains most of its inherent grain structure--some extremely light noise reduction seems to have been applied in some scenes--and I didn't spy any overt edge enhancement or other forms of boosting. The image is sharp enough as-is, with defined facial features and visible clothing textures in close-ups.

The Perfect Game Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The film's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track won't blow your doors off with intense cross-channel effects or massive LFE output, but it has what it needs--fidelity, a balanced mix, and no odd drop-outs, buzzes, muffling, or crackles. This is a fairly restrained track much of the time, with the balance shifted toward dialogue, which is always clean and easy to understand. You will, however, hear some light ambience from the rear speakers- -crowd applause, fiery smelter sounds, a ticking clock, traffic noise in Monterrey--and the film's music often takes up position in the surrounds as well. Bill Conti's score is heavy on bright Mexican brass lines, and there's a good mix of gospel and 1950s rock thrown in too. The music doesn't have a particularly deep dynamic range, but it's full and involving and clear. The disc comes with optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles in easy-to-read lettering.

The Perfect Game Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Director's Audio Commentary: A not-exactly-essential commentary from William Dear, who covers the usual ground.
• The Perfect Game: Behind the Plate (1080p, 13:00): A nice-but-short behind-the-scenes featurette with interviews and on-set footage.
• Soundbites (SD, 25:36): A series of short interviews with Clifton Collins Jr., Cheech Marin, Jake T. Austin, Jansen Panettiere, Ryan Ochoa, Emilie De Ravin, William Dear, David Salzberg, and Christian Tureaud.
• "When You See Forever" Music Montage (720p, 4:32): Clips from the film set to the cheesetastic song from the title menu. You can select the English or the Spanish version.
• Why Little League Rules (SD, 00:51): Two commercials for the Little League organization.
• Trailer (SD, 2:27)

The Perfect Game Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Perfect Game is yet another sports movie where the underdogs beat the odds and emerge victorious over their bigger/faster/better opponents in the final moments. It's nothing new, but it is based on an admittedly remarkable true story. Anyone even remotely jaded toward motivational films should steer clear, but as far as inspirational movies go, you could do much worse, and I imagine The Perfect Game's emphasis on faith and hope will make it a hit with church groups and the like. (It's "Family Approved" by Dove.org.) Trust your instincts on this one.