(rated PG-13, 110 mins.)
An attempt at a Mayberry RFD story based in the land of clam chowder and salty sea air of Cape Cod where 1 of 6 professional players are hand picked by scouts, from a team called the Chatham A’s. Ryan Dunne (Freddie Prinze Jr.) is an amateur ballplayer with a good left arm who dreams of the big leagues. He and a group of his pals including Billy Brubaker (Matthew Lillard) spend days on the mound and nights scoring home runs with the local girls. He also spends days cutting lawns for his father’s landscaping company where he meets the girl from the mansion on the hill, Tenley Parrish (Jessica Biel), and falls in love. While Lillard steals the movie with his sidekick antics, and Biel makes for a lovely society snob’s daughter, the dialog seemed lame and the jokes sometimes crudely overdone. Prinze and his romance with Biel is lightweight though they’re enjoyable to watch on screen with their dazzling smiles. There are worse things than this movie, like violent ones, but overall this attempt “Field of Dreams’ totals a nothing on all score boards and strikes out at the plate.
