SUMMER CATCH

The Red Sox will win a World Series before Hollywood makes a great baseball lm. Certainly Summer Catch, a rag-tag teaming of Bull Durham, Major League, and Good Will Bunting [sic], is no contender. Set in Chatham (bad-accent alert), it has local lawn boy Ryan Dunne (Freddie Prinze Jr.) aspiring to elevate himself through his pitching talent. He used to mow the out eld of the home-town Cape Cod League team where future superstar Nomar once shone; now he’s on the mound. And not just throwing to home plate — he’s also pitching woo to Tenley (Jessica Biel), the daughter of blueblood summer resident Rand Parrish (Bruce Davison, once again playing the snooty pater to a slumming trust-fund baby after crazy/beautiful), one of his dad’s landscaping clients. Any dad who’d name a child Tenley would never stand for this, and the pressure from Mr. Parrish’s disapproval, Tenley’s insipidity, the rivalry of the pitching staff, the inanity of Ryan’s pals, the lumpenness of his father (Fred Ward in a fair performance when he lays off that broad “aah”), the childish misogyny, and a script that reads like a line-up card makes for some rocky innings. For a first-time director who has a first-rate baseball documentary under his belt (Hank Aaron: Chasing the Dream), Mike Tollin looks bush-league in the baseball scenes. To paraphrase the film’s best line: summer movies, some are not. At Clarks Pond, Falmouth, the Nickelodeon, Auburn, Biddeford, Brunswick, Lewiston, Saco, Wells, Windham, Barrington, Newington, Somersworth, and the Salisbury 95.

— Peter Keough