User reviews

Al (Albert Brooks) is, at the moment, a hapless scout for the New York Yankees. His last sure thing pitcher tossed his cookies on the mound in front of the huge crowd, just before he bolted for the turnpike. Al is sent to Mexico this time and not in any known territory. Unbelievably, in the Mexican hinterland, an American named Steve Nebraska is just waiting for Al to discover him. And, what a discovery! Steve can pitch at 106 miles an hour and hit a baseball over 600 feet, even if he is a bit weird. Al brings Steve back to NY and the Yankees, most impressed, sign him on one condition. Nebraska must pass a psychological examination! Can he do it? Will the shrink dandily named H. Aaron help? The premise of this movie, along with Albert Brooks' fine performance, are enough to sustain this movie to the end. Fraser, also, does another fine turn as the freaky kid on the block. But, one can not help but say what if. There are several loose ends that just never get tied and the result is a good movie but not a great one. Bull Durham, Major League, and It Happens Every Spring, now these are fine baseball movies. This one just doesn't measure up. Still, if you are a baseball movie fan, you will want to see this one, sure. This film is loaded with good ideas that are worth exploring and jabbering about. Stock up on hotdogs and colas and invite the baseball buddies over for a screening.

Albert Brooks stars as a down on his luck desperate baseball scout who finds a golden arm (Brendan Fraser) while in Mexico. Unfortunately he is a little bit eccentric. Has some good bits dealing with the fish out of water plot but overall it doesnt build up any steam and just kind of fizzles itself away.. on a scale of one to ten.. 5

"The Scout" is an underrated comedy, which though never quite hitting the heights gives good value in the funny-sentimental entertainment stakes and benefits from two excellent performances (Albert Brooks - in a role "Seinfeld"'s Jason Alexander would probably over-play on television - and Brendan Fraser). The hidden depths of the film - the young player's childhood "abuse" for instance - remain hidden (the movie seems shy about going there) but as old-style, far-fetched shtick the picture works very nicely.

After seeing THE SCOUT again on TV, I've come to accept that the main problem with the film is that it's actually two completely different films smashed together. On the one hand you've got the comedy surrounding Albert Brooks and his hunt for that one baseball player who will save his scouting career. As one of our great comic screen writers, Brooks delivers some witty lines now and then, particularly in the first part of the film. However, the second film is a half-written drama dealing with the emotional/mental problems of Steve Nebraska, Brendan Frasier's character. There's next to know explanation and/or resolution to his emotional storyline, and although the wonderful Diane Wiest as his psychiatrist is on the team, she barely makes it to the warm-up spot and pretty much fades out without much ado. Screenwriter Brooks keeps tossing tantalizing hints into Frasier's emotional mix - the laundry concerns, for example -- but then does nothing with them. By the last inning, THE SCOUT can't decide whether it's FEAR STRIKES OUT or MAJOR LEAGUE.

Al Percolo (Albert Brooks) is a scout for the Yankees. He bends the rules and lies to get the latest phenomena Tommy Lacy (Michael Rapaport). However Lacy turns out to be a complete flop and runs away. Al is punished to scout deep in Mexico. He stumbles across Steve Nebraska (Brendan Fraser). Yankee boss Ron Wilson (Lane Smith) fires him. He decides to bring Steve back to the States himself. The Yankees bids $55M for him to pitch but they need a psychiatrist's letter. Al picks Dr. Aaron (Dianne Wiest) out of the phone book.

Albert Brooks is annoyingly sleazy. He's really off-putting and has none of the likability of 'Broadcast News'. The movie doesn't actually need to show all the ugliness. It needs to get to Brendan Fraser much earlier. The first part is not as funny as the filmmaker thinks it is. Director Michael Ritchie made one of my favorite comedy 'The Bad News Bears', but his resume is inconsistent. If this has any hope for this movie, it's the chemistry between Brooks and Fraser but it's not funny enough. The baseball stuff is ridiculous. Brooks is like fingernails on the chalkboard. It's simply not good no matter how crazy Fraser acts.

Sent on a route through the deepest parts of Mexico because of a big screw-up, New York Yankees talent scout, Brooks, finds the pitcher of the century in Fraser: a top-notch pitcher and a very good hitter, too. The only problem is that Fraser has the mind of a pre-adolescent teen, whose goals are simple, but his temper and emotional needs get in the way.

The movie has a good premise, and the stars of the baseball diamond appear in many cameos (including Yankees mogul Steinbrenner) have a nice touch. The actors try to do a good job, but they just don't pull this movie off. There is no "believability" to it! I just don't buy it!

The only good scene where Fraser demonstrates his child-like anger is when he tells the photographer to, "stop taking pictures of me...weren't the first thirty-four enough?" His emotional attachment to Brooks is found early on, but the therapist's theory of "possible homocidal tendencies" towards Brooks is not brought out enough in the movie. There is no substance to this film. If you're a Fraser fan, you might enjoy this film, but I found little else of any value and no credibility in this film.

First of all, let's deal with the fact that this movie isn't at all about baseball. Not in any real sense of the sport - it's more of a wry comedy that Albert Brooks specializes in. Brendan Fraser stars in the type of role he'd spend the next few years of his career perfecting - the lovable doofus who doesn't quite have a clue but is impossible to truly dislike. He's Steve Nebraska - uber-prospect baseball pitcher who has found his life and career derailed and ends up pitching semipro baseball in Mexico. Brooks is a baseball scout on the downside of his career, in purgatory south of the border when he discovers the immensely talented - but quite immature - Nebraska. He sees this as his ticket back to the bigtime and shops his pitching prospect around the majors, eventually signing with the Yankees where Nebraska makes his debut in the World Series.

Now is when this film careens towards the edge and drives off a cliff. It's not about baseball, fine. But it involves baseball to a heavy degree, even including several major leaguers and baseball people in cameos. The climactic scene takes place in Yankee Stadium during the World Series. It may not be a sports movie, but it owes its entire premise to the sport of baseball, and as a result, owes that game a semblance of respect. What it ends up doing is shafting the game so completely and making such a mockery of baseball that it ruins whatever it had built up through the rest of the film.

There is simply no excuse for building Steve Nebraska as the greatest pitcher ever - a guy who not only throws 110 mph and knocks over his catcher AND the umpire with pitches, but also hits like Barry Bonds. A guy whose first ever major league appearance is in Game One of the World Series - not only a ludicrous prospect for dramatic purposes, but completely impossible in real life (the rules of baseball don't allow this, discussion ends there). A guy whose debut game consists of throwing 81 straight fastballs past major league hitters - none of whom even so much as make contact - and who throws all of them at 110 mph. (Infamous point - the last pitch is FASTER than the first pitch). Physics dictate a guy like this would completely shred his rotator cuff, labrum muscles, and probably destroy every ligament in his elbow. Not to mention any major league lineup worth its salt (for instance, one playing in the World Series) would sit on this guy's fastball and absolutely torch him the second time through the order.

Is this nitpicking? I don't think so. The Scout may be better judged as a comedy than a baseball movie, but it can't totally remove itself from the sporting aspect. I think that any movie that involves baseball as heavily as The Scout does owe it to its audience - as well as its subject matter - to make some slightest bit of effort to craft something that doesn't insult fans of the game. You can make sentimental stories that use baseball as a backdrop - and involve legendarily talented players - that don't mock the game and flip it the middle finger. The Natural comes to mind.

As a comedy, it's average. As a baseball movie, it's completely insulting and awful.

The Scout is one of those sports movies that gets it right in enough ways to make it watchable, but gets it wrong enough to make you cringe in more spots than you'd like. Brendan Fraser is really terrific as the dopey, wide-eyed innocent of a pitcher who becomes the subject of a massive game of tug of war at first between teams to see who signs him, and then between his love of baseball and his fear of failure. His career has flourished thanks to roles like this, the downy innocent amid a swamp of leaches. This part of the movie is really good. The huge, over-exaggerated bidding war between baseball clubs for his service, it all is real enough to be familiar, and satirical enough to really make fun of and kind of predict baseball's current situation, in which money has become more and more the driving force behind the game. The movie also has a bevvie of terrific cameos like Bret Saberhagen, Keith Hernandez, who oddly seem mistcast as Mets stars in a movie that circles around the Yankees, and of course, a small but prominant role for Yankee owner George Steinbrenner. But in the end all of this winds into a ridiculous debut outing in the first game of the World Series. Let's start with the fact that you can't just join the roster in the World Series. It doesn't work that way. No matter how touted you are, no team will carry a pitcher on their post-season roster (and no, if you're not on that roster the whole way, you cannot join it) who won't pitch unless you get the Series. It doesn't work that way. And his 81 pitch, 81 strike perfect game is ludicrous. I mean completely preposterous. This is a movie that gets so much right in its satire of the game's economics (the Yankees winning the bidding war here is a nice little nod to the current situation where the Yankees are hated throughout the baseball world for their tossing around of money as if it were the fake paper stuff you get with a Monopoly board) and gets so much wrong in the baseball sense. In how good Steve Nebraska (Fraser) is, all sense of realism is throw horribly out the window, and the movie becomes little more than a silly baseball movie. As a Yankee fan, and a fan of the game itself, i expect better of a baseball movie.

As someone who knows absolutely nothing about baseball, and therefore can view the movie without that particular bias, I'd have to say it was cute. Light humor interspersed with bizarre, bratlike antics on the part of all characters. It'd almost be a good kids movie if they could have left out the swearing.

This is an endearing comedy which, as a Brit who knows precious little about baseball, I enjoyed a lot. The main reason is the performance of Brendan Fraser as the emotionally immature prodigy, Steve Nebraska. There are elements of his later role as George Of The Jungle here, although George was never this vulnerable or unpredictable. Dianne Wiest makes for a sympathetic psychiatrist and Albert Brooks is an affable rogue of a talent scout.

It was fun watching Brooks do his bit. Given most movies that I've seen on the TV as of late, to include the offerings on Pay per View, HBO and Starz, this one was a welcome change. I've read some reviews that say the ending was less than acceptable. Well, such is life. A story doesn't have to have a transcendental message to be enjoyed. For those who think that's essential, I suggest they watch the movie up to the final fifteen minutes, turn off the TV and make up their own ending. As for me, I can live with it just the way it was. One clear measure that I have that it was a movie worth watching? Well, my wife actually stayed awake through most of it!

BRENDAN FRASER seems to specialize in playing dumb--or at least that's the impression I had after watching him emote as a child-like baseball player who happens to have a great pitching arm in THE SCOUT. He does get laughs with his dumb act, so I suppose that's why he was chosen for this particular role.

But most of the laughs come from the fact that ALBERT BROOKS is his co-star, a man who can say a funny line without ever giving a hint that he thinks it's funny. And sometimes, the result is hilarious--particularly in the "knife" scene in which Brooks is trying to hide all his kitchen knives from Fraser who "wants to cut something".

None of the humor is particularly subtle, but DIANNE WIEST is a welcome addition as Dr. Aarons, the psychiatrist who determines that Fraser might have his dangerous moments after subjecting him to a series of tests with photos. But the baseball scenes at the finish are too over-the-top, straining credulity to the limits.

The Tony Bennett nightclub sequence is also guaranteed to have you squirming in discomfort as Fraser sings an off-key version of "I Left My Heart in San Francisco", much to Bennett's chagrin.

Summing up: With a wittier script and a different approach, could have been a very winning comedy.

Really The Scout is a sort of dumb comedy, but that can be good. It is rather silly and that is the point. It's plot is implausible. The plot twists are odd and somewhat predictable. But I liked it and watched it more than once. So don't write it off because it doesn't fall into what the ideal of a baseball movie should be. If you write it off do it because it does not live up to its cheesy comedy roots, and frankly it odes that. If I had a VCR here I'd be running out to the Blockbuster now.

"The Scout" begins as an awesome comedy, continues as a pointless drama, and ends as a cliffhanger of cornball. A film rarely starts high and goes down so quickly. It's as if the filmmakers with each extra scene gradually lost their nerves

This movie just needed more time to bake. It never really decided what sort of movie it wanted to be. Albert Brooks neurotic jokes? A man looking for help with a troubled past? A screwball comedy where balls fly around a parking garage like a cartoon? A buddy movie?

Or a baseball movie? It felt like they tried all of these a bit but never really landed the plane (or should I say heliopter). It should have introduced Fraser a lot sooner, got to Dianne West a lot sooner, included more of the therapy scenes, and had a whole lot more baseball. For a baseball movie, there wasn't enough of It. The movie could have been 30 minutes longer with more character development and a stronger message.

Directed by Michael Ritchie. Starring Albert Brooks, Brendan Fraser, Dianne Wiest, Lane Smith, Anne Twomey, Michael Rapaport, Barry Shabaka Henley, Tony Bennett. (PG-13)

New York Yankees scout Brooks discovers a (literally) unbelievable talent in the form of young Fraser, who can hurl 100+ mph fastballs and bash home runs with the greatest of ease; trouble is, the kid has some serious emotional and psychological issues. Starts quite well, with Brooks in fine form, but by the time it veers into heavy dramatic territory exploring the prospect's problems, it turns sodden and awkward and never recovers (even when it abandons that serious side for a triumphant conclusion). Wiest's talents are underused as the doctor that tries to help Fraser. The climax showcases the most absurd sports movie feat since William Bendix's Bambino cured a sick and paralyzed kid just by saying "Hi" to him in "The Babe Ruth Story." Bennett plays himself, and several sports figures make cameos, including George Steinbrenner.

51/100

This movie starts out great, especially the scenes with Brendan in Mexico, but turns for the worse once his personality is fully revealed. A bizarre film that is a drama bookended by comedy. Wiest does her part very well, and "The Boss" is his jerk self. Not enough baseball scenes. It's a like a sports-themed "The Cable Guy", in that it's supposed to be funny, but Fraser is downright psychotic in some scenes. It of course wraps it up too quickly in the end. A dream World Series matchup though; Yankees-Cardinals.

4/10

Albert Brooks co-wrote and stars in this sometimes-bright but terribly unsubtle comedy about a talent scout for the New York Yankees who loses his reputation after getting a skittish college Freshman signed to the team (the Yankees apparently scheduled the kid to pitch in a televised game without any training or pre-game publicity whatsoever, so don't they get what they deserve?); Brooks is banished to South Central Mexico to find talent, and yet when he comes up with another promising pitcher, he's fired over the telephone (in one of those excruciating sitcom developments the movie occasionally falls prey to). The new pitcher (Brendan Fraser, still in "Encino Man" mode) is a child in a young man's body, thereby linking the scout and the player on an emotionally-needy basis (not solid ground for laugh-out-loud comedy). Brooks as an actor is very ingratiating--he always has been--but this material, despite some very amusing one-liners, is stale, highly concocted, and immature. Many real-life sports luminaries appear in cameos...perhaps they should have been allowed to strengthen the script. ** from ****

I think sometimes people take some movies too seriously, and this is an example of one of them. This is a fantasy baseball movie, not something that would actually happen. Does anyone think that "The Natural" was realistic? Brendan Frasier is great in his role as a child trapped in an adult's body due to an abusive childhood, but who is one of the greatest baseball players ever. Albert Brooks is also great as the scout whose bad luck suddenly changes when he discovers him in the middle of Mexico, and is so excited about his talent that he ignores the mental problems that Frasier's character has. However, Im disappointed we never learned more of what was actually wrong with him.

Why do they let Brendan Fraser keep on making movies? He's not funny, he's hideously deformed and his antics get on my nerves like you wouldn't believe.

A scout for the Yankees, after finding prospects in the past who "flake out", is sent to Mexico where he finds Steve Nebraska (Fraser), the greatest ball player that ever lived. But after a mandatory psych exam, Nebraska begins to "flake out", too.

The general plot is decent, and the idea of a perfect ballplayer is a fun one (though hardly original, especially after I just watched "The Natural"). But Fraser is not a likable character for me, and I was really hoping he would be hit by a bus. The film is thoroughly predictable with no twists or surprises at all, and an ending that still leaves some key issues unexplained (again like "The Natural" it ends rather abruptly). I can't say what they issues are at the risk of writing spoilers, although I don't know how you can spoil a film this simple.

In the beginning of the film, the scout brings in Michael Rapaport as his star player (before Rapaport flakes out). Now, if he had brought in Fraser and then later on had Rapaport playing Fraser's part, this film might have been one of the better baseball movies ever made. But whoever did the casting clearly has no idea that Fraser is utterly worthless as an actor. A few cheap laughs in "Bedazzled" and "Encino Man" do not a great comedian make.

Considering that this film had the screenwriting and acting talent of Albert Brooks, one of the funnier writers in the industry, and the acting of Brendan Fraser (don't laugh, I actually think he's a pretty good actor), it was very disappointing to see it fizzle the way it did. It starts off great, with Brooks being banished to Mexico, and the Fraser character is amusing for a little while. Unfortunately, we get bogged down in the emotional trauma of Fraser's eccentric ballplayer, when we should be enjoying the silly antics we all came to see. Let's face it, the Fraser character should have been a wacky, yet lovable idiot, but instead is a whining, depressed, troubled person. This really doesn't work, since the story would easily have lent itself to a comedy, and Brooks still seems to think he's acting in one. I don't really know where this went wrong, I have a feeling that there were some conflicting ideas on the writing end, but this movie is best left on the shelf. If you want a great Albert Brooks film, see Defending Your Life.

I'm a big Tony Bennett fan, but the rest of the movie was childish. Did I mention Tony is a class act? Seriously I could find no reason why this obviously American born person would be hiding away, south of the border, the part with him hanging out up in the rafters of the stadium trying to make up his mind to play or not was so frustrating for me, I found myself trying to decide if I wanted to destroy my VCR or not. I felt very uncomfortable for Mr. Bennett in the scene where he was upstaged on his "I Left My Heart In San Francisco" segment of his show. I don't want to seem to harp on this particular part, but it is what stands out in my mind when I think of this film..