Eight Men Out (1988)

Sorry, this movie sucks

Must See Movie...

Great Film overall

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The topic was quite interesting, especially to Chicagoans, namely the 1919 Black Sox scandal when it was discovered by suspicious reporters that several of the White Sox players were deliberately playing badly during several crucial games which would have brought the Sox into the World Series championship, and its aftermath.So where did this movie fail? Basically, it tried to cover too much with too many characters-the players, the managers, the reporters, the fans, anyone connected, so that the film lost focus. Nobody is developed, and it takes a scorecard to figure out who is who and what is going on. We don't learn exactly what went on or why. Comiskey is depicted as a skinflint who had little regard for his team, but I read elsewhere that he wasn't as bad as the movie depicted. Shoeless Joe Jackson was depicted as clueless, and while he was illiterate (still not that rare in that era), that didn't make him incapable of knowing what was going on. Also, what motivated the corrupt baseball players other than greed? They weren't working for starvation wages.The movie neither works as drama or as a depiction of history.

This is based on a true dramatization of the Blacksox scandal in 1919 when the ridiculously underpaid Chicago White Sox accept bribes to throw The World Series against the Cincinatti Reds. The players involved get a lifetime ban in the MLBI must confess that I knew very little about this classic occurrence back then. I've heard a bit about it from my Father, but I wasn't very knowledgeable on the subject. It had a great cast, and I was really interested in the story, plus. I love baseball, so I had to check it out. The story is very riveting, with a very detailed account of what happened in 1919. The character development is solid with these guys, and it takes it's time telling the story, which I really appreciated. I must also commend how fantastic the baseball action was. Not only was it extremely realistic, with retro costumes that mirrored the time period with perfect precision, but it was quite exciting as well. It had a very retroactive atmosphere to it. These aren't your ordinary movie stars who try to fake being an athlete, these guys do it all. John Cusack dives at third base to snag some rough liners. Charlie Sheen runs into a wall, by catching a tough flyball in the outfield. David Strathairn looks and feels like a knuckleball pitcher. It was very well done. The court scene at the end involving the whole ordeal was intense. Performances: John Cusack is the morally superior character here. He is excellent as Buck Weaver and very likable as well. You'll feel for him a bit at the end. David Strathairn is the morally conflicted one, and his low-key, yet powerful performance was great to watch. Charlie Sheen has the perfect combo of arrogance & likability in his role, as the flashy outfielder. I loved him. D.B Sweeney is utterly stupendous as Shoeless Joe. John Mahoney is also very good as the oblivious, yet supportive manager. Michael Rooker, Christopher Lloyd, Michael Lerner, Clifton James, Don Harvey, and the rest of the cast are rock solid. Bottom Line: Even if you don't know much about the 1919 incident, this is a highly recommended viewing experience. 8.5/10

Eight Men Out is the real life story of the 1919 Chicago White Sox's team that threw the world series for a big pay day. In the early 20th century, baseball players were barely payed enough money to live on, so when organized crime stepped in and offered a big pay day for throwing the 1919 World Series, half the team said yes. The film Eight Men Out is based on the book by Eliot Asinof, the first to officially tell the story of what happened. Until this book, people knew the outcome, but not the particulars. While the book goes into great detail, the movie does not. The film gives us the basics in a very simplistic form, in order to make it more dramatic, and that's the one part of this film I didn't really care for. The things I really wanted to know more about never seemed to materialize and a lot of what we saw in return was the Hollywood exaggeration effect. Don't get me wrong though, the film was very entertaining as it showed a lot of the action on the field and touched on some aspects of the scandal. The acting was stellar and it was really fun to see Charlie Sheen and John Cusack right as they were first starting out. As for the ending, well that was expected, but I still really enjoyed the sports action, back stories, and even the over the top dramatics surrounding the story. It may not be very in depth or even historically accurate, but seeing it again all these years later, I can now appreciate and understand why it is considered one of the top ten sports films of all time.

Excellent film retelling the tawdry story of the 1919 Chicago Blacksox baseball scandal. Not being an American baseball fan or otherwise greatly familiar with the story, I did a fair bit of reading up on the subject beforehand and was pleased to see that the movie stays pretty close to the characters and events as they actually unfolded. To this day, there's controversy over whether the disgraced star player Shoeless Joe Jackson ever actually had the famous phrase "Say it ain't so Joe" thrown at him by a disillusioned young fan, but the apocryphal quote coupled with Jackson's mute response is so much part of popular culture that the film-makers just couldn't exclude it.It also underpins one of the main themes of the film, disillusionment and misplaced hero-worship as the talented but sorely undervalued Chicago baseball team fall in with a bunch of on-the-make shyster crooks who lead them to the Mr Big behind the fix which will see them "tank" the World Series against Cincinatti for some ready cash. The story is a sad one, the only winner in the end being said Mr Big, Albert Rothstein, whose last scene in the film is his exiting from a bookie's after only two balls of the first game, having learned from this that the fix was on (the Chicago pitcher signalling it by deliberately hitting an opposing batter with an early throw). The offending players saw little if any of the money promised them and in a bitter-sweet ending to the film we see their short-lived joy at obtaining a somewhat dubious acquittal of all criminal charges (helped by their signed confessions mysteriously disappearing before being offered in evidence) dashed the very next day by then picking up lifetime bans from the sport from its newly appointed hard-line Commissioner.The story is so strong that for the film to work it only remains for the director to evoke the era and stay true to the tale. This John Sayles does handsomely, with first rate cinematography and costumery, more than backed up by excellent ensemble acting by a no-big-name cast. The matches themselves are likewise convincingly recreated (at least they seemed so to my untutored eyes) and the drama, with the tensions in the Chicago team between the fixers and their honest colleagues (the latter including the team's disbelieving but still trusting coach) honestly represented.This film transcends its genre as a "sports movie" with its use of baseball and its treatment of its lifeblood employees (i.e. the players) as a microcosm of society as a whole. As ever, the poor little guy loses big reaching up while the rich guy (whether under the cloak of respectability and authority, as personified by the despotic baseball team owners or the no more culpable Teflon-coated underworld kingpins) makes a fortune looking down.