There have been poetic, glorious baseball movies: The Natural, Field of Dreams, Eight Men Out, The Babe. This ain’t one of those. There have been touching, personal baseball films like Bull Durham, Radio, The Rookie, and League of Their Own. Nope, not one of those, neither.
Instead, The Benchwarmers comes from another, um, tradition— goofy baseball comedies like Bad News Bears, Angels in the Outfield, Mr. 3000, and Major League. But this time there’s a new wrinkle: grown-ups versus kids.
On the one hand, even for three grown ups against a full Little League team of nine kids, you’d think it was a no-brainer. Except for one thing: these grown-ups really do have no brains!
They are played by Rob Schneider, David Spade, and Jon Heder. Jon played Napoleon Dynamite; Clark, who he plays here, could be that character’s less “together” older brother. Let’s just say the best job Clark can get after high school is paper boy, and he’s not even great at that.
Rob plays Gus, the sort of leader of this trio of misfits. They were always picked on as kids, and still are as adults. Then they see some tough boys pushing this one sad kid around on a park’s baseball field. They come to his defense, only to find themselves pitted in a baseball game against a whole little league team whose name should not be the Bulls, but the Bullies.
One of the pint-size pugilists, Kyle, is played by Matt Weinberg. He was the voice of Simba in the video Lion King 1½. This is not his first movie with Rob, either; he was in Rob’s movie The Hot Chick. Anyway, in Benchwarmers, he’s little… but he’s got a baseball bat and he knows how to use it! He’s also got a mouth that’s bigger than he is.
We won’t tell you whether our heroes win or lose, but they get to a point where they need some outside help. They find it in the form of Jon Lovitz, who finally gets a nice big movie role. We have been following him since his days on Saturday Night Live, but you’ll probably recognize him from his silly Subway “Eat Frrresh!” commercials. Jon plays a billionaire, Mel, who was also picked on when he was a nerdy kid, and he takes the Benchwarmers under his wing. He hires them a special coach (a really great surprise so we won’t ruin that!), gets them uniforms, builds them a stadium, and even gives them their team name: The Benchwarmers.
A “benchwarmer,” he explains, is “a kid who warmed the bench while the others got to play and have all the fun.” So for all of you who always got picked last when teams were chosen, or who got stuck in right field, or who never even got to play… here’s your movie!
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