Million Dollar Arm (2014)

Million Dollar Arm arrives from Walt Disney Pictures in 2014 with the confidence of a studio that has studied its own inspirational sports playbook and decided no page needs revising. Jon Hamm plays J.B. Bernstein, a sports agent who, having run out of retired clients to represent, travels to India to conduct a televised pitching contest among cricket players. Two winners emerge, Rinku and Dinesh, played by Suraj Sharma and Madhur Mittal with genuine warmth, and are promptly flown to Los Angeles where they understand neither baseball nor elevators. The film casts its South Asian roles with care and gives its two leads real screen time, which counts for something. It also filters every event through the spiritual education of its white protagonist, who learns about family, commitment, and the hazards of treating young men as portfolio assets. The assets learn to throw. He learns to feel.

There is a mild rebuke of the sports industry buried in here, something about investors and publicity stunts and the difference between a client and a person. It never hardens into an argument, because Disney has a formula to protect and a Dodge Caravan to sell. Lake Bell's Brenda exists to diagnose J.B.'s emotional failings and then to kiss him, which is a narrow professional scope. A. R. Rahman supplies the score, and Amit the interpreter supplies the third-act pep talk, delivered with the earnest volume of a man who has been told the trailer needs a moment.

The film is based on real events and treats them with standard-issue reverence, making no attempt to reinterpret the historical record in service of a contemporary thesis. Its progressive instincts are limited to casting and a general fondness for cross-cultural understanding, both of which it handles without much strain. What we have, then, is a competent and pleasant product, agreeable in the manner of a hotel lobby, and about as likely to unsettle anyone.