Summer Catch: Critic Reviews

Will Ryan get signed by the majors? Will he win Tenley's heart? If you're even wondering, this movie's for you.

When it comes to the plot, well, there are more surprises in a box of crackerjack.

Depending wholly upon the blinkered empathy of daydreamy teen viewers, a typical FPJ movie skims over character, plot, and dialogue.

Summer Catch is supposed to be end-of -summer fun, but it's about as fun as learning to eat your spinach.

[An] awful light drama.

When it comes to funny business, Tollin's got game, and he makes the most of some talented supporting players on his bench.

Offensively bad teen movie that makes a bore of both baseball and sex.

A half-hearted baseball romance full of weak reminders of better films.

Because I'm a baseball fan, I tend to be an easy mark for baseball-themed movies, but something as badly focused and feebly scripted as Summer Catch just makes me wish for the Fall.

Stars Freddie Prinze Jr. (strike one), features more male virgins trying to lose it (strike two) and disses the legendary baseball league in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, by filming this mess in North Carolina (strike three).

The interplay of Ryan's professional and romantic challenges rings true, but unfortunately the writers pile on contrivances and needless distractions that seriously diminish the film's overall effect.

The film steps up a notch when the action is on the field. However, many directors before him have portrayed the beloved sport better.

A baseball movie with no baseball, no movie, and absolutely no love involved.

If this is what the boys of summer are offering, I say bring on football season -- now!

Not that this is a particularly dispicable film, it just doesn't try to do anything new and delivers mostly wooden performances.

Perhaps Freddie is simply a pawn in some sinister plan to destroy his career...

Call this one foul.

Yawn.

Freddie Prinze Jr. has become the opposite of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. His face on a movie poster guarantees a bad time.

Don't catch it. Drop it.

Whitman is right: Baseball is our poetic register, and so I've become whimsical for the days of tee-ball and George Brett and when baseball movies were beautiful.

Primarily to blame for this mess is the leaden script by Kevin Falls and John Gatins, which absorbs a bushel of baseball clichs while demonstrating a singular inability to present love, sex or even bawdy jokes.

Check it out if you're drunk and looking for a shoulder-shrugging time-waster...

Notable only for the spectacle of watching both Prinze and Biel getting out-performed in the same motion picture by Matthew Lillard.

In the interest of maintaining the status quo running time of 80-some minutes, we are subjected to a painfully ugly series of subplots and side characters.