Movie review score
5
The Sandlot
is sparsely narrated by the main character (now an adult) who
occasionally drops in on the action to comment on events or help move
the story along. Tom Guiry
plays Scotty Smalls, the shy new kid on the block who wants to join the
rowdy pickup baseball team that plays every day in the neighborhood
sandlot. But he doesn't know how to catch a baseball, and his stepfather
(Dennis Leary)
is too busy to teach him. He tries out for the sandlot gang anyway, and
though he isn't very good, it turns out he's lucky: there happen to be
only eight of them, and nine makes a team. The summer passes blissfully
as Scotty learns to play ball under the wing of Benny Rodriguez (Mike Vitar),
the oldest and best player, as well as Ham, Squints, Repeat, and the
rest of the kid-eccentrics. The skies darken, however, when Benny
literally knocks the stuffing out of the team's only baseball, a sign of
impending doom, or worse, bad luck. Wanting to set things right, Scotty
returns home and "borrows" his stepfather's ball, which he promptly
uses to hit his first home run, knocking the ball clear out of the
sandlot into mean old Mr. Mertle (James Earl Jones)'s
junkyard, home to Mertle's legendary guard dog The Beast. Scotty admits
that he took the ball without asking, and he naively explains that his
stepfather will want it back since it had a woman's name written on it:
some lady named Babe Ruth. Horror-stricken, the sandlot gang mobilizes
to fetch the autographed ball from the clutches of The Beast, building a
series of mechanical ball-retrieval machines which get progressively
more complicated and preposterous as The Beast's size grows in their
imaginations. ~ Anthony Reed, Rovi
Source : movies.msn.com