Cult movies challenge the laws of the entertainment market. They don't have a target audience, they can be blockbusters, B-list movies or just decently budgeted and they can be about just anything. MAJOR LEAGUE was not supposed to be a cult movie. Replacements and unlikely heroes are a common theme in big productions, but they are as corny and formatted as it can possibly get. Professional athletes are fascinating creatures. Even moreso in the downside of their career. MAJOR LEAGUE captures what it is to have a troublesome personality for professional sports and makes one hell of a replacement movie anyway. Because that's what real cult movies do. They do the exact opposite of what you expect them to.
Any self-respecting sports fan is aware that Cleveland is an absolute wasteland for professional players. Their teams always find ways to screw things up. They even lost their hockey team and their football team, who went to win Super Bowls for another city *. MAJOR LEAGUE is about the Cleveland Indians, the city's baseball team, prey to an opportunist owner (Margaret Whitton) who wants to move the team to Miami **.So the hires the worst possible fuck ups, so she can tank her gate under 800,000 people a year and legally move the team. But professional sports aren't an exact science. Build a team full of headcases and what do you get? One, big, unstoppable and talented headache.
MAJOR LEAGUE features a pre-meltdown, semi-serious Charlie Sheen, do I need to say more? He plays Rick Vaughn, a directionless delinquent with a fiery fastball and poor eye sight. Two decades of perspective and one well-played, media-friendly meltdown have done Sheen wonders. He doesn't have a pivotal part in MAJOR LEAGUE, but I couldn't help myself but to snicker at his scenes, imagining how coked up he must've been during the shooting ***. Tom Berenger and James Gammon also deliver the goods. They're both solid actors who understand the small nuances of their jobs. Berenger, especially, shows his range as he alternates between humour and brokenness as ex-all star catcher Jake Taylor. He got the sappiest part in MAJOR LEAGUE, yet he found the proper to make it work.
Pre-steroid era Wesley Snipes is an underrated comedy genuis.
There is a sincerity to MAJOR LEAGUE that you just don't find in other sports movies. The common narrative trope would be to manipulate the viewer and imply that a traumatic event magically imbued the team with chemistry before they go on a winning streak. The Cleveland Indians of MAJOR LEAGUE are a bunch of talented screwups at the start and they are talented screwups at the end. They're just too talented to fail and part of what makes MAJOR LEAGUE hilarious is the clash of uncompromising personalities being such a stunning succes on the field. Rather than presenting model we should aspire too, this movie presents people who have common character flaws and succeed anyway. I'm not sayting it was deliberate, but MAJOR LEAGUE found a sweet niche to immortality.
MAJOR LEAGUE is comforting because it survived for the right reasons. It's a movie with heart and integrity that found cult status for unpredictable reasons. It also has a collection of wacky action stars who would all be destined to tabloid headlines and awesome B-list movies in their careers. I often say that there are perfect things. MAJOR LEAGUE is a perfect object. It could never be revisited or improved in any way. It's a movie you can go back to over and over again when you stop believing in the alchemy of movies. It's a happy accident in the often sad and predictable history of Hollywood comedies. Cult movies are not engineered. They just happen like MAJOR LEAGUE happened.
MAJOR LEAGUE is comforting because it survived for the right reasons. It's a movie with heart and integrity that found cult status for unpredictable reasons. It also has a collection of wacky action stars who would all be destined to tabloid headlines and awesome B-list movies in their careers. I often say that there are perfect things. MAJOR LEAGUE is a perfect object. It could never be revisited or improved in any way. It's a movie you can go back to over and over again when you stop believing in the alchemy of movies. It's a happy accident in the often sad and predictable history of Hollywood comedies. Cult movies are not engineered. They just happen like MAJOR LEAGUE happened.
* Althought they got the Browns through expansion and they still suck.
** The movie came out like, six years before the Marlins.
*** By the way, did you know that Sheen was two years the elder of Philip Seymour Hoffman? Cocaine will do wonder to your body.
