Moneyball

I'm not the biggest fan of sports, I don't take sport particularly seriously and really can't empathise when others do. However sports films, when done well, can evoke quite strong emotions and although I know next to nothing about baseball, this film appealed to me as it was based on a true story.

The film starts with the Oakland Athletics baseball team losing the final game of the 2001 season. With three of his top players leaving, General Manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) has to work out how to replace the players with virtually no money.

After a disagreement with the team scouts on how new players should be selected. Beane visits another baseball team where he meets Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) who tells him about a new method enabling him to select new players using certain statistical attributes.

Having been convinced that the new selection system would work, Beane hires Brand and sets about employing new players that have effectively been cut adrift from the league. These players are very cheap and he can sell them on once they have shown their worth.

Whilst doing this, he finds obstacles in the form of the scouts who resent that he is ignoring their experience and the Oaklands manager Art Howe (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) who disagrees with Beane's tactics and on more than one occasion defies Beane's instructions.

The film then goes on to chart their season and gives an insight into how cutthroat the buying, selling and trading of players can be.

I saw this film a few days ago and waited to write this review as I'm really not sure about it. On the one hand, it's an interesting theory into how statistical data can enable a player to be seen in a very different light. On the other hand, as I know nothing about baseball (and the film goes into some detail about various statistics which determine whether a player would be effective in a particular team), it went over my head...

I will say that the script was very sharp and tight (another fine job, Mr Sorkin) and all of the actors played their roles well. There was no need for the father-daughter anguish story (which I have read is fictional). It added nothing to the story and was frankly a waste of time.

On a personal note, I would really like to see a Brad Pitt film without Brad Pitt eating in every other scene. It's getting very off-putting.

Verdict: If you are a baseball fan, this will probably be one of your top five films of the year. However as the subject matter held little interest to me and I didn't understand a lot of the statistical analysis that they were using, this was not a film for me.