Starring: John Hamm, Aasif Mandvi, Lake Bell, Bill Paxton and a veritable who’s who of who’s thats? from famous Indian movies that I will never watch because I don’t have to and no one can make me.
Director: Craig Gillespie
Writer: Tom McCarthy
It wasn’t but a few minutes into the movie I realized I’d been duped. I’d thought from the title Million Dollar Arm was a movie about ex-astronaut Steve Austin getting an upgrade to his cybernetic arm. After all Six Million Dollars doesn’t go nearly as far as it used to. But no. This wasn’t a film about the Bionic Man lifting things over his head and throwing them at evildoers. It was about a baseball agent looking for potential players in India. I hope John Hamm at least got a nice vacation out of it.
It’s supposedly based on a true story and since major and minor league baseball is just overrun with Indian baseball players right now, we all already know how it’s going to end.
The movie opens, like most sports movies do, with a scene so stupid you can’t believe the person that wrote it has ever watched a sport, used Google or speaks English as a first or even second language. Hamm is wooing a football player named Popo Vanuatu, played by Rey Maualuga in his best acting performance before he somehow fooled the Cincinnati Bengals into re-signing him this offseason. Vanuatu is willing to sign with Hamm’s firm, but only if he gets a $1 million dollar bonus.
Now, here’s what’s crazy about that because, and you know this without me telling you, agents don’t pay players and never have. This is knowledge you already possess. You understand it fundamentally because you’ve watched maybe 15 minutes of SportsCenter in your life.
No matter how cut-throat the agent game is, this isn’t going to happen. Agents make their money by getting a percentage of what the player makes from his contract. The better the agent, the bigger the contract, the more money for a player and the agent. If, say, a super-star player could be wooed with a million dollars, then every agent in America would be writing that check today. A star athlete like Vanuatu is presented to be doesn’t care about $1 million. He cares about $80 million.
Do you think there’s an agent in America that wouldn’t count out a million in cash to J.J. Watt right now to sign him as a client? Or Calvin Johnson? Or Russell Wilson? Watt just signed a $100 million extension with the Houston Texans. You think 15-20 percent of that might be worth $1 million in cash? We’re all victims of the same United States educational system, but the day you can’t do the $15 million is more than $1 million math problem is the day you need to have all the forks in your house hidden away from you.
And the idea that Hamm, a professional and successful, at least in the past, sports agent who represented Emmett Smith, Barry Sanders and Curtis Martin wouldn’t have $1 million available is the only real joke in the movie. And I think it was kind of trying to be a comedy.
And here’s the worst part; the director, the writer, the actors in the movie all have agents. They all now precisely how this works because that’s how it works for them and they still made this and put it out in the world as if it won’t possibly kill someone like me with the stupidity present in the first few minutes. Uncool, guys.
The movie acts like all his clients have retired, which is stupid anyway, since there are, literally, 300 new football clients leaving college every year, and that’s not counting baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer, horse racing, MMA, boxing… I don’t think I need to go on. The idea that a good agent could “run out of clients” makes this a fantasy movie, more unrealistic than anything Peter Jackson filmed in Lord of the Rings. Of the 500-plus newly-graduated, draft and professional-eligible athletes that show up on the street every single year, Hamm hasn’t signed a one and has no prospects of landing one. So he has to go to an entire other continent.
Over there he runs some kind of contest and brings back two young guys to train as pitchers, Rinku and Dinesh, and is forced to move them into his house because they’re astounded and amazed at city and hotel living and set off a fire alarm in an elevator because they’re idiotic bumpkins and the guy that wrote this movie doesn’t realize India has had a sophisticated urban civilization since at least 2600 B.C. But, you know, it’s funny to see stupid foreign people do dumb things.
I could tell you what happens next, but I don’t want to spoil you. Also, you already know what happens next because you couldn’t be reading this if you suffered a recent traumatic head injury.
The Final Verdict: Every hard copy of this movie should be tossed in the Ganges River.
Fun Fact: The two Indian players the movie is based on Dinesh Patel and Rinku Singh are real people, as is Hamm’s character J.B. Bernstein. They both really did end up in the Pittsburgh Pirates organization but almost everything else in this movie is complete crap.
Patel washed out in 2010, never got out of the rookie league and went back to India. Singh made it as high as Double-A, but injuries and Tommy John surgery have halted his career, costing him any chance to play in 2013 and 2014 and an elbow injury has cost him 2015. He’s still, technically, with the Pirates. But, you know, the bait will probably be cut soon because real-life happy endings are for wusses.
