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Credits

Release Date: Sep 14, 2001; Rated: PG-13; Length: 106 Minutes; Genres: Comedy, Drama, Sports; With: Diane Lane and Keanu Reeves
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By Lisa Schwarzbaum
Lisa Schwarzbaum
Lisa Schwarzbaum
Lisa Schwarzbaum is a film critic for EW

In The Gift, Keanu Reeves tore into the role of a violent wife abuser with gusto. Unrepentant aggression had replaced his usual Zen-zombie affect, and the change of style looked great on an actor who, in a continuing effort to scruff up his own beauty, has made a career of inhabiting characters for whom heroism is a demand, not a choice: the cop in Speed, the football player in The Replacements, the candidate for manly rehab in Sweet November.

In Hardball, Reeves plays Conor O'Neill, another weak-spined specimen (he's got gambling issues) who becomes a better man in spite of himself. This corny life-affirmer about one white guy's spiritual redemption at the small hands of black kids on an inner-city baseball team is loosely based on the real experiences of writer Daniel Coyle, who coached in Chicago's infamous Cabrini-Green projects. But the movie is so littered with cliches of genre, as well as cliches of artifice in Reeves' pained performance, that any semblance of social reality goes foul.


Posted Sep 21, 2001
 

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