It's a decent film. Plenty of people do consider it an iconic movie and a baseball classic. A lot of people were also put-off by the fairy tale aspect of the film.
Many years ago I tried to watch this film and lost interest after like 30 minutes. It might be good,though. I just wasn't in the mood I guess.
Never really liked "The Natural". It wasn't really the fantasy aspect because "Field of Dreams" is one of my favorites and it had a fantasy angle. To me, "The Natural" just didn't feel like real sport. It seemed to soft and girly. In my opinion, the most underrated baseball movie is "For Love of the Game". It's one of my top 5 favorite sports movies. Vin Scully calling the game gives it an amazing feel. Vin Scully: And you know Steve you get the feeling that Billy Chapel isn't pitching against left handers, he isn't pitching against pinch hitters, he isn't pitching against the Yankees. He's pitching against time. He's pitching against the future, against age, and even when you think about his career, against ending. And tonight I think he might be able to use that aching old arm one more time to push the sun back up in the sky and give us one more day of summer.
The baseball portion in that is some of the best fictional baseball footage put on film.............unfortunately the non-baseball plotline did it's best to try and ruin the whole film.
when I read the synopsis I thought it sounded interesting, an average baseball player starts killing it out of nowhere, I thought it would be a good hard sports drama, but they had to cheese it up with him being a prodigal talent who gets shot and that was the reason why he was just mediocre. I lost interest about 40 minutes in.
