Plot
This blend of sports and youthful romantic comedy is from director Michael Tollin, who previously produced the sports drama Varsity Blues (1999). Freddie Prinze Jr. stars as Ryan Dunne, a ballplayer who's spending the summer as a pitcher for the famed, highly prestigious Cape Cod League, a non-professional farm team that has turned out numerous baseball legends. Ryan's under special pressure on a number of fronts. He's the first local boy to earn a slot in the league in years, and his blue-collar status earns him the enmity of a hot-shot college teammate, Eric Van Leemer (Corey Pearson). Although he's backed up by his best friend and team catcher Billy Brubaker (Matthew Lillard), Ryan adds more stress to his life by embarking on an affair with a beautiful, wealthy young Vassar graduate, Tenley Parrish (Jessica Biel), who's spending the summer on the Cape with her parents. Tenley is facing her own crisis as her father (Bruce Davison) pressures her to move to San Francisco and work with her uncle, though she'd rather remain in the East and become an architect. Summer Catch is the third onscreen teaming of Prinze and Lillard, and also stars Brian Dennehy, Wilmer Valderrama, Jason Gedrick, Fred Ward, and Brittany Murphy. ~ Karl Williams, RoviReview
The Freddie Prinze Jr. movie has become a category unto itself: constructed with basic genre efficiency and zero sticking power. That's a good way to summarize Summer Catch, an agreeable enough but totally predictable baseball romance that has all the impact of a foul-out to the catcher. Because audiences have grown bored of this lazy enslavement to the status quo, Summer Catch took a beanball to the head from critics. Obviously inspired by Bull Durham -- to the point of having a pitcher don ladies' undergarments, a la Tim Robbins' Nuke LaLoosh -- Summer Catch does occasionally scrounge together some of that film's baseball-in-the-sticks charm. The renowned Cape Cod league for college players is a nice focal point for this brand of sentimentality, and the characters are not all egregious stereotypes. Prinze is fine, perennial collaborator Matthew Lillard is plenty goofy, and Jessica Biel is just enough more than a pretty face to connect. But it all adds up to very little, because nothing feels challenging, funny, or memorable -- just tepid and safe. One can barely mount the energy to curse the film up and down for its faults, because no one moment inspires howls of disbelief. It's just vanilla -- not the good kind of vanilla, but rather, the stale pint at the back of the freezer case, ignored and unseen. ~ Derek Armstrong, RoviCast
- Freddie Prinze, Jr. - Ryan Dunne
- Jessica Biel - Tenley Parrish
- Jason Gedrick - Mike Dunne
- Matthew Lillard - Billy Brubaker
Credit
Juliet A. Polcsa - Costume Designer, Mike Tollin - Director, Harvey Rosenstock - Editor, Herbert W. Gains - Executive Producer, George Fenton - Composer (Music Score), John D. Kretschmer - Production Designer, Tim Suhrstedt - Cinematographer, Brian Robbins - Producer, Mike Tollin - Producer, Sam Weisman - Producer, John Gatins - Screenwriter, Kevin Falls - Screenwriter| Summer Camp Nightmare (1986 Film), Summer Camp (1994 Film) | |
| Summer City (1977 Film), Summer Clouds (2004 Film) |
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