Striving to to be an Air India “Jerry Maguire” by sending a morally compromised sports agent to India in search of clients and redemption, “Million Dollar Arm” gets buried under a thick layer of bland, sweet Disney custard. Despite the pulsing South Asian score that gives the film some energy, it’s not even a slumdog hundredaire.
At the outset, Jon Hamm does everything but sing “Free Fallin’ ” as his sports agency flails. He hits on the desperate move of venturing into uncharted territory for pro baseball: India. The sport is unknown there, but cricket bowlers, he reasons, are kind of like baseball pitchers, and anyway, out of a billion people someone must be able to throw a baseball. Plus, finding an Indian player would mean opening up the majors to a huge untapped market.
“Million Dollar Arm” is a true story about two Indian pitchers who did indeed get discovered by J.B. Bernstein (Hamm) and signed by the Pittsburgh Pirates organization. You can tell some producer heard about the story and said, “It’s just like a movie!” Yes, a really dull and predictable one. It works only as the most undemanding kind of wholesome family entertainment.
You can see every turn from the opening: J.B. is kind of a jerk, the girl next door (Lake Bell) is pretty and smart. India strikes him as smelly. This being a Disney effort, though, J.B. not only doesn’t hit bottom, he doesn’t even hit the middle. It’s hard to feel sorry for a guy who drives a Porsche and looks like Jon Hamm. The hint of decadence consists of this: We hear him say he dates only models. Scandal.
Writer Tom McCarthy has made some fine films, such as “Win-Win” and “The Visitor,” but this script is as deep as home plate, and director Craig Gillespie (“Lars and the Real Girl”) matches him in betraying his indie background, just as Hamm comes across as a gelded version of his sinister “Mad Men” character.
In a laborious series of tryout scenes in India, J.B. gradually becomes friends with the girl next door via Skype. (Why are they chatting so much if they didn’t like each other when he left LA?)
Alan Arkin brings a little wryness as a crotchety old scout, but J.B.’s, and the film’s, observations about India are shallow and trite. (Things stink, Indians honk too much.) It’s like he’s a Victorian colonialist bemused by all these strange little foreigners. This makes him mildly unpleasant company, but he should have been a full-on wiseguy who cracks wise about everything he
sees. A hilariously derisive cynic who finally realizes what matters makes for a better arc than mild rudeness turning into mild niceness.
When the two Indian winners of J.B.’s “American Idol”-style contest, called “the million dollar arm,” return to California, the movie stumbles along with a series of woeful fish-out-of-water jokes. The boys (Suraj Sharma, Madhur Mittal) and J.B.’s Indian assistant (Pitobash) are likable enough, but they don’t even get distinct personalities. Instead they’re interchangeably childlike fellows who push all the wrong buttons on elevators and puke in J.B.’s Porsche (which, in the tortured logic of the script, somehow costs him a major business deal, the same one he already lost at the start of the movie).
“Million Dollar Arm” is certainly infused with the spirit of today’s baseball: It makes you check your watch a lot.
Though Bell gives a charmingly laid-back performance, the inevitable romantic scenes don’t have much spark. The moral — that pro baseball is about learning to have fun — is nonsense, and even the big finish is a letdown: You expect to see the two boys pitching against each other in the World Series. In fact, six years after they signed minor-league deals, neither has even made it to the pros. (They signed for eight thousand bucks.)
Fatally mild, slow and factory-made, “Million Dollar Arm’’ belongs somewhere less competitive than the multiplex. Like the ABC Family Channel — the entertainment industry minor leagues.