In the spirit of what’s turned into a series of 80s movie reviews, I decided to revisit the 1989 sports comedy Major League.
If you’re unfamiliar with Major League, it’s a light comedy firmly in the “ragtag team of misfits learn to put aside their differences to win the big game’ mold. This movie managed to rise above the pack thanks largely to snappy dialogue and endearing performances by Tom Berenger, Bob Uecker, Wesley Snipes, and Charlie Sheen.
That’s what makes this film notable from a creative standpoint. The screenwriters and actors took a rather shopworn concept and elevated the material to the status of a middling 80s classic. Major League essentially did for sports flicks what Ghostbusters did for horror movies–albeit with rather less cultural penetration and commercial dominance.
ML was still a hit though, earning back roughly five times its budget at the box office. And chances are most of you at least recognize Charlie Sheen’s trademark character Ricky Vaughn–especially if you subscribe to dissident politics.
Brief plot synopsis: The gold-digging trophy wife of the Cleveland Indians’ recently deceased owner plots to activate an escape clause that will let her move the team to Miami if attendance drops below 800,000 for the season. To that end, she fills up the roster with the worst players she can find. The result is a club full of dysfunctional circus freaks. Two complications threaten to foil the owner’s plan: 1) the players catch on and resolve to win out of revenge, and 2) an amazingly talented nobody just happens to crash Indians training camp.
I’m old enough to remember the original marketing campaign for Major League. The trailers and TV spots portrayed the movie as cheeky and edgy. Irreverence definitely abounds, but that was the late 80s, when putting Charlie Sheen in your movie with a Christmas tree-inspired haircut and glasses from Hot Topic could still pass for edgy.
Upon review, what most stands out in Major League is what doesn’t stand out. The movie was filmed in the summer of 1988–almost exactly thirty years ago. The time span between then and now brings more iconic 80s genre-blending comedy, Back to the Future, to mind. Marty McFly traveled back in time from a 1985 of video games, silk screen t shirts, and Burger King to a 1955 of The Honeymooners, poodle skirts, and diners.
Movies make good time capsules, and Major League shows us that not only had pop culture remained essentially unchanged between 1985 and 1988; it hasn’t changed much between 1988 and 2020. The first sign that Major League wasn’t filmed in the present day comes roughly half an hour into the movie when somebody is shown talking on a huge old-style cell phone. Otherwise, the first act could have taken place anytime from the mid-1980s till now.
But pop culture is not the entirety of culture, and the intervening changes to the latter are apparent in this film. Major League is yet another comedy you could never make today thanks to rampant political correctness. Pedro Cerrano and his Jobu shrine would never be allowed by Hollywood’s cultural kommissars.
Even then, the production hedged their bets by taking pains to mock the film’s sole openly Christian character. Still, the heathen is shown giving up his superstition in the end, so the movie’s underlying ethos is closer to garden variety secularism than the current Death Cult hysteria. But you can glimpse it on the horizon in retrospect.
As I mentioned in my review of Galaxy’s Edge: Legionnaire, the mark of a superior comedy is that the story would still work if you took out the jokes. Major League fulfills that criterion. The characterization is especially competent considering the size of the ensemble cast they were working with. Yet all of the main characters are introduced and fleshed out just enough for the story to work in a relatively short amount of time.
My one gripe with the story has to do with the movie’s conflict–specifically, the antagonist’s motivation. The players stand to lose their jobs if her plan succeeds, which are sufficient stakes to believably motivate the team. The owner’s motive is that she simply dislikes Cleveland and would rather move to Florida. Thus, she suffers from a case of Wile E. Coyote plot. Instead of orchestrating a lengthy and costly Rube Goldberg plan, why doesn’t she just sell the team and move to Florida? For that matter, why doesn’t she keep the team and move to Florida without them?
That’s just a minor quibble. All of the current tent pole superhero movies have far less coherent villain plots. Overall, Major League is a slightly flawed and too often overlooked gem from a time when comedians didn’t take themselves too seriously to tell jokes. If you’ve got some free time this week, I encourage you to dig it out and watch it again.
I also encourage you to check out Nethereal, the first volume of my award-winning action-adventure series.
