YOU GOTTA BELIEVE - Mark Reviews Movies

You Gotta Believe, Well Go USA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 29, 2024

You Gotta Believe is based on a true story that certainly deserves better. It's the tale of a kids baseball team rallying behind their coach, also the father of one of their own, who is diagnosed with a terminal form of cancer. Just the description of it is enough to make one feel a little teary-eyed, so why does this movie seem to go out of its way to evade such emotions?

Instead, director Ty Roberts and screenwriter Lane Garrison give us the broadly inspiring story of a team of bad players finally doing well and underdogs overcoming the odds. The coach's story starts to feel like a subplot, happening elsewhere and with little impact on what the team is doing and why they're doing it in the first place.

Luke Wilson plays the coach, a man who loves baseball and especially adores the sport whenever he watches either of his two sons playing the game. Wilson portrays Bobby Ratliff, a real man who briefly appears in some broadcast footage in the crowd at one of the games before the end credits roll. Watching the real man beam about the team, even as it's clear his body is in decline, makes one appreciate how much of that spirit the actor brings to this role, while also making one wonder why we need a dramatized version of this story when such footage—and obviously more, since it's also present in the coda—exists.

Saying a real story deserves a documentary instead of a fictionalized account, of course, is taking the easy road of critiquing such a movie, but there's still some truth in it. Wilson may be good here, especially in letting us see just how much this cruel disease affects this man in ways that contradict the sports story being told. However, the most powerful moments of the movie are that brief interview with the real Ratliff and a scene shot with the real-life son who was part of the underdog team. The specifics of that second moment won't be detailed here, but it's so potent that we can't help but imagine its impact if the movie before it was anywhere near as authentic.

In the movie, the son, who shares his father's name but goes by Robert (Michael Cash), is one member of perhaps the worst small-fry baseball team in Fort Worth—and maybe beyond. Bobby and his assistant coach Jon Kelly (Greg Kinnear), a long-time friend and corporate attorney, have tried their best, but the kids just aren't any good, which is fine and understandable.

Yes, Bobby has Robert walk all the way home from the final game of the season, which the team lost, but as training for next season and not as a punishment. Just before Bobby collapses from the pressure of a tumor on his brain, he tells both of his sons that he only cares about them doing their best and being able to watch them play.

All of this is sweet, sincere, and, once Bobby's diagnosis arrives, serious. The prognosis is terrible for Bobby—only a few months, unless chemotherapy eliminates the tumor. He realizes he needs to put his affairs in order, find a way to be honest with his kids without destroying any hope, and get started on treatment with the support of his wife Patti (Sarah Gadon).

This feels like an entirely different movie once the actual narrative takes over. It has Jon, who takes over as head coach, signing up the team for the Little League World Series qualifiers, simply because he wants his best friend to have a last opportunity, if it comes to it, to watch Robert play. From there, baseball pretty much takes over the movie.

We watch a montage of the team practicing with miserable results—diving for catches well before the ball is close, swinging a bat that flies through Jon's car windshield, throwing wild pitches, popping a foul ball that smashes a girl's CD player, etc. That's followed by a montage of a new assistant coach (played by Lew Temple), a former drill sergeant, getting the kids in order, focused, and working as a team, and soon enough, a string of games and unlikely wins pass by in a relative flash, played by way of montages of some highlights of key plays and the occasional amusing antic or two.

They're all playing for Bobby, of course, because the kids say so before the tournament begins and every so often when there's some downtime between the montages. Even so, the narrative still feels divided between the happy-go-lucky baseball side, which even includes a singalong at one point and counts on the team's success being the source of the story's inspiration, and the private moments with Bobby, which are physically and emotionally trying on the man and his family.

Clearly, the filmmakers want the latter to define the former, but in terms of tone and basic structure, the two goals of You Gotta Believe never come across as a singular whole. These are two very distinct stories, presented exactly as that, and the result is a movie that feels confused about what story it's actually trying to tell and how it wants to tell it.

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