This review includes full spoilers. Proceed accordingly. For other movie reviews from me, click HERE:
Comment: Let me tell you something kid; Everybody gets one chance to do something great. Most people never take the chance, either because they’re too scared, or they don’t recognize it when it spits on their shoes, or they’re wasting their time writing reviews about three decades old movies.
Rating: PG
Director: David Mickey Evans
Writers: David Mickey Evans, Robert Gunter
Stars: Tom Guiry, Mike Vitar, Patrick Renna, Chauncy Leopardi, Dennis Leary, James Earl Jones
Release Date: April 7, 1993 (United States)
Run time: 1 hour, 41 minutes
THE PLOT:
(via wiki)
In the late spring of 1962, fifth-grader Scott “Scotty” Smalls moves to the San Fernando Valley outside of Los Angeles with his widowed mother and recent stepfather, Bill. Smalls’ mother encourages him to make friends, and he tries to join a group of eight boys who play baseball daily at the neighborhood sandlot, led by Benny Rodriguez. When an attempt to play catch with his stepdad Bill injures Smalls and leaves him with a black eye, Benny invites him onto the team and helps him improve his skills and earn the other boys’ respect.
When DeNunez taunts Ham with his trademark pitch, “The Heater”, Ham hits a home run into an adjacent backyard, and the team is dismayed. However, they stop Smalls from retrieving the ball and tell him of “the Beast”, a legendarily and large, fearsome English Mastiff living behind the fence. In the many previous years, many baseballs have gone over the fence, but every single one has been claimed by the Beast.
One particularly hot day, the team opts to go swimming at the neighborhood pool, in lieu of baseball. They ended up getting kicked out after Squint fakes drowning so the lifeguard Wendy Peffercorn kisses him while giving mouth-to-mouth. The team plays a Fourth of July night game by the light of fireworks, and Smalls observes that, to Benny, “baseball was life.” They later play against a snooty rival Little League team and win. As a result, they celebrate at a fair that night, but get sick after chewing tobacco and riding the Trabant.
One day, Benny hits the cover off the team’s only ball. With Bill away on business for a week, Smalls opts to keep the game going, by borrowing his prized baseball autographed by Babe Ruth. Unaware of its value, Smalls hits his first home run, sending it into the Beast’s yard. When the team learns of the autograph, they quickly forge Babe Ruth’s signature on a new ball to be a temporary replacement while they come up with a plan to rescue the autographed ball. The team attempts to recover the lost ball with various makeshift devices, but each attempt is thwarted by the Beast.
Finally, Benny gets the courage to get the ball and climbs into the mertle’s backyard, a standoff insues between Benny and the beast, Benny takes off running for the ball, slides and grabs the ball and takes off running with the beast’s chain being ripped off, the beast climbs over the fence and chases Benny throughout town, the beasts jaws rip Benny’s baseball uniform but Benny outruns the dog all the way back to Mr. Mertle’s yard, but the Beast crashes through the fence, and it falls down on top of him. Smalls and Benny free the Beast, who gratefully licks Smalls’ face and leads them to its stash of baseballs. The two meet Mr. Mertle, who turns out to have been a baseball player and friendly rival of Babe Ruth, having lost his sight after being struck by a pitch. He kindly trades them the chewed-up ball for one autographed by all the Murderer’s Row.
Bill loves the Murderer’s Row ball but still grounds Smalls for a week for ruining his Babe Ruth autographed ball. Their relationship improves, and Smalls begins to call him “Dad”. The boys play on the sandlot the rest of that summer, and several subsequent summers with the Beast – whose real name is Hercules – as their mascot. As the years pass, the boys go their separate ways: Yeah-Yeah enlists in the army; Bertram disappears into the counterculture movement; Timmy and Tommy become an architect and a contractor; Squints marries Wendy, has nine kids with her, and the two run the local drug store; Ham becomes a professional wrestler: “The Great Hambino”; DeNunez plays triple-A baseball, but later owns a business and coaches his sons’ Little League team; and Benny earns the nickname “the Jet” after word spreads around about his encounter with the Beast.
As an adult, Smalls becomes a sports commentator and remains friends with Benny, now a player for the Los Angeles Dodgers, giving each other the same thumbs-up sign they have shared since childhood. In Smalls’ broadcast booth, he owns and keeps on display the chewed-up Babe Ruth autographed ball, the Murderer’s Row ball, the forged Babe Ruth ball, some pictures of Babe Ruth, and a large picture of the Sandlot kids from 1962.
My Review
The Sandlot is a nearly perfect coming of age movie. The kid actors are fantastic, the comedy still lands, and the story successfully walks the line between being a universally relatable reminiscence and a nostalgia-heavy and highly entertaining tall tale. My only real complaint about the movie – and it’s probably due to the film’s pursuit of realism – is that it has a few too many bad words to be sharable with smaller kids. The film is rated PG, but it seemed as though it got in as many youth swear words as it could without crossing over into PG-13. Would language like that have actually been used by a bike riding gang of baseball playing hooligans in the 1960s? Probably. Does it make it harder to show the movie to kids below that age? Yes. Nevertheless, and with that complaint aside, I really enjoyed the movie.
Tom Guiry was outstanding as the geeky friendless and mostly fatherless Smalls. If you’re a guy, you’ll relate to his performance – either because Smalls was you growing up, or because you remember a guy like him. Smalls’ dad died when he was young and his step-father was too busy and distracted to teach him to play catch. He moved to a new town and his first run at playing with the neighborhood kids was an abysmal failure. This could have been an end to his lifelong journey of masculine camaraderie, but he meets the right guy, at the right time, who brings him into the fold. This movie, filled with embellished nostalgia, is about the miracle of Benny taking the new guy Smalls under his wing. That more than anything is really the point of the movie. The baseball was superfluous. There is no big game. Winning is irrelevant. As the narrator tells us early on, they don’t really even keep score. At a fork in the road of his life, where he could have taken the path of isolation and a focus on his own interests, Smalls found someone in Benny who wouldn’t let him walk alone. That changed his entire life.
I read constantly about “the crisis of male loneliness” (HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, etc.) and this movie is a really emotionally powerful reminiscence about how one guy avoided it. It’s crazy that this was achieved because a fellow pre-teen was unusually inclusive. Yet I think most of the guys I know found several of their best, life-long friends, in their teenage years and then just stuck with them for the rest of their lives. If that window of time in one’s life opens and closes without a moment like the one depicted in the movie – as it does for most men – then the guy ends up in a bad spot. Smalls avoids that fate and it feels *really good* to witness that for him.
One thing as a modern watcher of the film that jumped out at me is how un-parented all the boys are in the movie. We see them not just playing baseball, but going to the pool, camping out, traveling across town on their bikes, chewing tobacco, riding carnival rides, etc., completely unsupervised. This did not jump out at much as much in 1993 when the movie was initially released because I spent a lot of my time as a kid also completely unsupervised. Times change and it seems unusual now. Smalls makes the journey from boyhood to early manhood, not with the help of his parents but via his peers. He wasn’t quite ready for that initially because of an absent father figure from his early childhood, but he overcame that hurdle with community. Would that have been possible if his mom had been hovering over him? Probably not. There’s an implicit lesson in stories like this – and it resonates – that kids need space to figure some things out on their own, even if it means failure, struggle, or embarrassment are part of the process. You just hope they’re surrounded by the right kids while figuring those things out.
One scene I enjoyed a lot as a kid was when Squints tricks the lifeguard Wendy into giving him mouth-to-mouth. It is absolutely the sort of implausible thing that would become an exaggerated legend in a group of guys. As an adult, the whole thing seems a lot more questionable. Of course, the courtship phase of a relationship often lives in that questionable space. I mean… there have to be people who started dating after someone catcalled the other, right? After he tricked her into mouth-to-mouth, Wendy calls Squints a pervert, bans him and his friends from the pool… and then smiles at him through the fence ever after. We later learn that they eventually get married and have nine kids together. How do you explain that dynamic to a kid watching the film?
“No means no, it’s true, and never do anything like that because it’s a creepy way of violating someone via their job responsibility. But yeah, sometimes a girl might decide later that she liked it.”
Your guess is as good as mine.
The entire plot thread surrounding “the Beast” was excellent. The story introduced the giant dog early and then slow-built him into a problem the group – but especially Benny and Smalls – would eventually have to overcome. The big chase that led to Benny’s nickname “the Jet” was just a joy to watch. And then after all of that, we find out that the dog is friendly, as is his owner. Was it extremely implausible that Beast’s owner is a former – and now blind – professional baseball player? Absolutely. But James Earl Jones plays Mr. Mertle with so much charisma and joy that I didn’t care about the implausibility at all.
Overall, like I said, I really like The Sandlot. It holds up really well after all this time, is funny throughout, well-acted (especially by Tom Guiry), and it definitely scratched a summertime nostalgia itch that I didn’t realize I had. I recommend giving it a rewatch if you haven’t seen it in a while.
Have you seen The Sandlot? If so, what did you think?