Underdog sports movies have slowly died down after they became such a huge sensation in the early 2000s. The reason, of course, is the narrative structure that said films follow. There’s always the hero’s journey somewhere in there while also being about the characters who shape the story for them. With time, the trope of this underdog became redundant, but few films every now and then were able to reconfigure or at least reaffirm why such stories are always important. They are rousing, relatable and inspiring. They give us hope in times when we find ourselves corned by our big ambitions. Ty Roberts’ “You Gotta Believe” is not one of those movies, though.
I mean, it does have all the usual tropes that you find in such films. It stars Luke Wilson and Greg Kinner as the co-coaches and dads of kids who are part of a little league baseball team. Their team is so bad that when we first meet them at their league’s last game, they are just happy that the season is over. However, life has other plans for them as Bobby, played by Wilson, is diagnosed with cancer, and Kinner’s Jon decides that he needs to do something beyond his ordinary and unfulfilling job to be satisfied with his life. With his dying friend and a bunch of kids who would do anything to keep Bobby happy, Jon and eventually the team set out to compete in something that they had no shot of sailing through in the first place.
You can guess the rest of it in the exact fashion it happens, even if you have only seen a couple of dozen movies. While cliches are welcome when done well, “You Gotta Believe” is the one that never even tries. Director Roberts cuts through baseball montages, shot in such a lazy way that you’d want to take the camera in your hands and do it yourself, and melancholic moments of Bobby facing and fighting against his life-threatening disease. None of those narrative threads have any sort of standout sequence or moment of triumph that would engage an audience.
Underdog movies work when you know about the stake, you know about the slim line where winning and losing coincide, and if there is at least one character that remains memorable. Here, the side characters are like trophies that have been sitting in the living room for far too long. They are now laden with layers of dust, and no amount of polishing will do the trick. The dependable Sarah Gordan and Molly Parker are wasted as characters that anyone could play in their sleep. The kids are given adult dialogues that sound so off coming from them that you’d pause and sit in disbelief that someone just wrote that.
To top that off, I don’t know why the film acts like it takes place in the 1980s. The kids ride BMX bikes, and the television recordings of the baseball game in no way make it feel like it is set in the 2000s. Knowing that the previous collaboration between Wilson and director Roberts, “12 Might Orphans,” was fairly watchable despite the based-on-true-story-underdog similarities, I wonder what went so wrong here. I guess the second time’s not a charm after all.
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