My Review of "Major League"

Major League is a baseball movie that came out back in 1989. It's a movie that I used to love back when I was a kid and I wanted to see if it would still hold up today. Watching it today I realize there are a whole slew of things that people will frown upon today. Some of those things were a product of the time and some things they should have seen back in the day.

The movie starts off with a great introduction to the major league baseball town of Cleveland, Ohio. For decades they were known as the Cleveland Indians. Just recently they've changed their names to the Cleveland Guardians due to their politically incorrect name and logos. This movie will remind you why many of those things were problematic.

In the movie, Cleveland's baseball team is basically at their lowest point in their franchise. They're at the bottom of the league and their owner just passed away leaving the team to his showgirl trophy wife, Rachel, to take control. They've gone on for decades as a losing team so attendance has been really low.

Now Rachel wants to move the team to Florida but in order to do this she needs the attendance record to be extremely low. She hatches a hairbrained scam to hire the worse baseball players she could in order to scare the Cleveland fans away.

Of course this being a Hollywood movie we know exactly where this is going to go. It's a very simple and straight forward story and you get your feel good moments here and there as well. If you love sports movies this has all your usual tropes in spades. I for one love these types of movies so I still ate up everything despite knowing exactly what's going to happen next. Those that love sports and romantic comedies love this sort of comfort movie.

That's until you realize you're watching it in 2022. The team has changed and there are a lot of politically incorrect indigenous references throughout this movie. To think that this cultural group had to go through this for so many decades is kind of crazy. Only now do I see the terrible things we did back in the day and understand why it was terrible. Back in the day no one would have been the wiser.

Unfortunately that's not the only problematic thing in this movie. I know it was the late 80s and they didn't have cell phones etc. Following someone from their workplace to their home and then sneaking into their home is not fine. I don't even think that was fine back in the 80s. That is definitely stalking with breaking and entering.

There is a side story with the main character Jake and his estranged wife Lynn that will make you question everything in the 80s. They put it in the movie so maybe this was accepted practice back in the day. It's not like Jake just came up with the idea, it was his teammate Willie that told him to do it. Crazy times!

Problematic situations aside the movie is still charming. The characters are created for us to love them and that's what we do. There is a very poorly portrayed Cuban player by the name of Pedro though. That was a very racist depiction of a Cuban player. You can argue that they used it for team building though.

I did like the fact that they made the city feel like another character in this movie. The citizens of the city all come together no matter how they were brought up to cheer for their team and that was a nice thing to see. They do a good job in making you feel like you were in Cleveland at the time of their unlikely story.

One funny thing about it is that it's a rated R movie. I think the only reason why it's rated R is because of the foul language used sparingly in this movie. Otherwise it is a fairly tame movie compared to what's out there nowadays. It's crazy how standards have changed so much.

Overall, I thought that this movie will be very problematic for many people. Those that grew up with this movie will likely not think twice about those problematic situations but may question it a little. I am kind of in the middle point. I still enjoyed it despite it being the way it is. I still have to give this movie a 7 out of 10. I'm kind of curious about the sequel now.