Everyone’s Hero

(voices)
Jake T. Austin
Rob Reiner
Mandy Patinkin
Forrest Whitaker
Whoopie Goldberg

Directed by: Collin Brady and Christopher Reeve

Christopher Reeve and his wife Dana’s final project before their deaths tells the story of a young Yankee’s fan, Yankee Irving (Austin), living in New York during the 1932 World Series. The owner of the Yankees rival Cubs hatches a plan to steal Babe Ruth’s bat in hopes of neutralizing the hitting power of the great Bambino. When the bat is stolen, Yankee Irving’s father is fired and can only get his job back if the bat is recovered before the last game of the World Series. With the help of a talking baseball, Screwie, Yankee must find the bat and take it from New York to Chicago in order to get his father’s job back and save the World Series.

This film is a bad example of a growing trend in computer animated films. In the early days of Pixar, computer animated films were special film events that came about once or sometimes twice a year. These high quality films became very profitable and other studios began to get involved. Now it is not uncommon to see more than one computer animated film a month. Whenever studios flood the market with a specific type of film, normally the quality drops off significantly and you end up with a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. The plot of the film, even for a kids movie is completely ridiculous, the execution is tedious and the feel good message of “always keep swinging” no matter how tough life gets is heavy handed and repeated way too often, even for a film geared towards the under 12 crowd. The supporting characters of “Screwie” the baseball and “Darlin” the baseball bat, while at first were funny and maybe a little cute, became annoying and grating. As the film progresses there really is no attempt to flesh out the film and progress with an interesting story. We just get more of the same annoying line liners by increasingly annoying characters, culminating in an ending that even children would role their eyes at.

This film should have never been released in theaters. Overall it is barely solid enough to be marketed as a direct to DVD video or a special cable release. The choice to actually create a computer animated film rather than just conventionally animate this film makes no sense to me at all. The only time the computer animation was used to actually enhance the movie was when the animators chose to randomly add extensive detail to completely innocuous items. I really can’t find a reason why anyone should see this movie, even if parents are looking for a way to occupy their children’s time for and hour and a half. There has to be a better way to spend the price of a ticket and concessions.
 

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