Der Unbeugsame

Baseball is not exactly my favorite sport. In fact, I would place it at the bottom of the list of sports I love. However, this movie is so well-made that it is impossible not to fall in love with Robert Redford. You just wish him luck from the beginning to the end. Moreover, if sports movies are also about the main character’s charisma, then Roy Hobbs is doing great. And it doesn’t matter at all that I am not interested in baseball. (06.05.2015)

The twenty-minute unintentionally funny prologue, which mixes the idealisation of the "good old days" with a fifty-year-old Redford as a rookie of less than twenty, is pure garbage. Fortunately, it picks up in quality with a leap forward of 16 years. The still 50-year-old Redford unsuccessfully pretends to be a generation younger (at the same time he's like Brimley in the role of a shriveled coach), but it's at least tolerable. This is good, because even though it contains a few barely believable WTF moments (yes, Madsen's departure from the scene in particular), it can also be a damn good sports drama that often doesn't necessarily follow the beaten track of similar type of films – except for the moments when it does, and in those moments, paradoxically, it stumbles above all, because it combines realistic, naive, exaggerated and sometimes fairy-tale motifs with classical clichés, which doesn’t fit together. (07.02.2021)

I'm a little at a loss – baseball is about as much fun for me as searching for water in the Sahara, but the reputation far preceded this film, and I was genuinely looking forward to seeing guys like Redford and Duvall. I must say that in many ways it didn't disappoint – the retro atmosphere works brilliantly (especially in the iconic beginning on the farm), the script brings deeper moral dilemmas and questions than one would expect, the final match has power even after thirty years, and Randy Newman composed the iconic soundtrack. Redford is a heartthrob and Basinger an amazing femme fatale. That said, I still had a nagging feeling that Levinson alternates stellar moments with downright routine ones much more often than would be appropriate (like the protagonist), that he sometimes stretches the film too far, that he stages some moments rather mechanically and boringly, and that he doesn't quite know what to do with Robert Duvall's character, who doesn't get a chance to express himself properly. And it's a shame, because the script works very effectively with its original motifs, always returning to them at the right moment or varying them based on Hobbs's personal development (the return of an old love during the first game crisis, the introduction of the son during the second, the repetition of the pitching scene, the cracked ball vs the cracked bat, the introduction vs the conclusion), so that even the obligatory pathos gives way to a carefully constructed catharsis in the finale. But those 130 minutes are just too much, and the middle part is filled primarily by its inability to come up with something spectacular, so I simply can't squeeze 4 stars out of it... 70% (27.09.2018)

This is such an unbelievably pathetic and cliché film that tries to evoke emotions in you at all costs, it's incredible. But it's such a great film that it completely won me over with its approach. It's sometimes so exaggerated that it's simply beautiful. In the end, I didn't even blink and just watched as it was stretched out until the very final climax. Robert Redford is simply a masterful actor. (29.12.2015)