Customer Reviews

Angels in the Outfield/Angels in the Infield

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Both these movies ("Outfield" comes first chronologically) are really less about heavenly assistance than about people having to learn to believe in themselves and in their own ability to beat the odds and bring about their dreams. The Anaheim Angels are a baseball team so bad they make the old New York Mets look good. But, like the Mets, they have their loyal fans, including 11-year-old Roger Bowman (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and his younger best friend JP (Milton Davis, Jr.), who live in a foster home not far from the Angels' stadium run by Maggie Nelson (Brenda Fricker). Roger's mother is dead and his father (Dermot Mulroney) is at best an intermittent presence in his life; when the latter prepares to make him a ward of the state, declaring that their being a family again is about as likely as the Angels making it out of the cellar (or perhaps the sub-basement), Roger begs Heaven to somehow make this possible. And, lo and behold, suddenly there are angels in the outfield, though only Roger can see them--which makes life very difficult for manager George Knox (Danny Glover) and his team. Christopher Lloyd is delightful as Al, the boss angel, who has a manic gleam reminiscent of Lloyd's Doc Brown in Back to the Future.

In the second movie, it's six years later, and the Angels, having just missed winning the World Series after Roger's intervention, are back in the cellar again, with a new coach and a new lineup featuring pitcher "Steady Eddie" Everett (Patrick Warburton), who as a rookie made the errors that lost the team the Series. Everett's ex-wife Claire (Rebecca Jenkins), a college professor who's been invited to do a guest turn at a Boston university, leaves their 12-year-old daughter Laurel (Brittney Irvin) with him in her absence, at Laurel's request: she doesn't know much about baseball (ballet is her thing), but she knows it's important to her father, and she wants to get to know him. Like Roger, she decides that only Heaven can make a difference in the situation, and Heaven responds--with Bob Bugler (David Alan Grier), an angel of such low degree that even after ten years he hasn't earned his wings, and a former member of the team. Complications arise when the other side (represented by Colin Fox as a delightful red-skinned devil) takes an interest in the Angels' second dash for the top (for reasons not specified) and starts gumming up the works. The sequel is more slapstick-y than the original, but it's still enjoyable, especially as Laurel tries to help Bugler's hapless quartet of rookie-angel assistants learn to work as a team. I'm not a fan of baseball--like Laurel, I know very little about the game--but I found I didn't have to be in order to enjoy these two titles.

DVD is in great shape, but movie itself is not exactly a work of art.