Moneyball

This isn’t any film; this is a hard-hitting, economy driven, baseball-centric film which ticks all the boxes. For starters it has one of the biggest names in the business, Brad Pitt, backed up with Jonah Hill. Whilst retaining elements of many underdog movies and those with plots based on some whiz kid doing maths, this film is primarily a biography of small time Major League team hitting it big.

In essence the plot is fairly formulaic with its “trials and tribulations” approach. It boils down to a team with has a small budget so can’t really afford any of the big name players. General Manager of the team Billy Beane (Pitt) employs the services of Peter Brand (Hill), a young Yale economics graduate, to work out a new system to get, as the American’s say, the ‘most bang for your buck’. Cue some more trials, couple of obstacles and maybe a hurdle or two and suddenly, with a slight twist, everything falls into place.

The film manages to keep you gripped throughout with Pitt’s award-winning performance as he makes the film his own. While not all guns and glory this film has a kind of passive action and urgency to it which very few films recently have been able to create which is perhaps why then it is ranked in the Top 10 of such papers as The Washington Post and The New York Times. What this then amounts to is a good fun film for everyone to enjoy.

Harry Austin