I knew when I started the Summerfest project, in which I review one movie each week with the word 'summer' in the title in hopes of giving faithful Screengrab readers something to do when it's too hot to wash your car, that there would be sacrifices. Since my only criterion for inclusion was the presence of the word 'summer' and Netflix availability, I knew that there would be a couple of movies that would be pretty lousy, especially given the sort of movies that come out in the summer. But I didn't realize until the 2001 Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicle Summer Catch arrived in the mail that I truly understood to what depths I was willing to sink in pursuit of the project. A lot of things should have warned me off: the uniformly negative reviews; the fact that I couldn't find anyone who remembered the movie being released, let alone actually seeing it; the dire circumstances predicted by the words "Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicle". But I made a promise to you people, and I'm not one to break a promise, even one that involves a hundred minutes of Jessica Biel reading inspirational slogans from an insurance company calendar in voice-over narration. I'm not saying you should watch this movie; I'm not even saying you should go into a room where this movie once sat. I'm just saying:
Put on your cleats and spit on your hands, because we're about to slide face-first into Summer Catch.
THE ACTION: Freddie Prinze Jr., who looked like he might have a career at one point until he kept making movies like Summer Catch, plays a hotshot local playing in the prestigious Cape Cod baseball league. (Much as lame platitudes stand in for dialogue, and Jessica Biel in a bikini stands in for a plot, North Carolina stands in for Massachusetts in the film.) He's got a chance to make it to the big leagues as a pitcher, but first he must overcome a variety of challenges: his dad and his coach, who alternate between telling him that he's the greatest thing since Walter Johnson and telling him that he's the worst thing since Jaime Navarro; his rival, who is heavily tattooed and is an arrogant jerk (well, the rest of the players are arrogant jerks too, but they don't have a lot of tattoos or a demeanor that makes it seem like they're on their way to tie Polly Pureheart to a railroad track); and his complicated love life, which requires him to choose between Brittany Murphy, who does an interesting trick involving beer, and Jessica Biel, who does an interesting trick involving wearing a bikini.
THE PLAYERS: Directed by the guy responsible for Radio and written by the guy responsible for The Temp, Summer Catch clearly wants us to pay no attention to the men behind the curtain. Instead, all of our energies are meant to be devoted to the young hunks and beautiful babes on screen, but in the case of the lead actors, it's difficult, because Prinze has no personality and Biel has a bad personality. Some decent character actors, including Fred Ward and Brian Dennehy, are brought in to class things up a little bit, but both of them are both looking off camera a lot to get a high five sign from their accountants that the check cleared and don't really bring anything to their roles. As for the rest of the cast, this is a movie where guys named Marc, Christian, Corey, Wilmer and Gabriel play guys named Miles, Dale, Rand, Auggie, and Calvin, or something like that, and it's really hard to keep track of which one is which. They're all supposed to be wacky, though. I think.
SUMMER FUN: Although Summer Catch is built around the all-American summer sport of baseball, it's really about the all-American summer sport of attractive teenagers making out with each other. Oddly enough, though, it fails to satisfy on both counts: the baseball action is pretty tissue-thin and there's not enough at stake that you really give a shit whether any of these dufuses make it to the bigs or not, and, by the same token, the supporting characters are all so obnoxious that you begin to actively hope that none of them ever get laid, either. The class conflict angle is undersold and the romantic leads are terminally boring, so the script tries to distract us with the wild-and-crazy antics of Prinze's teammates. Unfortunately, the movie's idea of high-larious comic action is making one of the players an unrepentant chubby-chaser, leading to some highly dignified scenes of him seducing fat girls for comic effect. Oh and also there's the guy who keeps farting in an umpire's face.
HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: Unfortunately for all of us, this is a very different era than the 1980s, and no teenager is going to pay nine bucks to see James Van Der Beek or Freddie Prinze Jr. wearing a Hawaiian shirt. There was a time when they would have made one of the ballplayers a fat guy and let him wear a Hawaiian shirt, but in a movie like this, the only people who are exempt from being blindingly attractive are the fat girls that Marc Blucas uses as slumpbusters a la the ever-classy Mark Grace. It's slightly possible that Brian Dennehy's character, the irascible baseball coach, owns a Hawaiian shirt, but he hasn't worn it in several decades because he's been too busy crushing the dreams of impressionable teenagers.
BIKINI PARTY TIME: By this point, I think I may have already mentioned that Summer Catch features footage -- and rather extensive footage, at that -- of Jessica Biel crammed semi-successfully into a bikini. I'm not going to lie to you folks: if all you're looking for in a summer movie is Jessica Biel in a bikini (and I will by no means condemn you if that is in fact what you're looking for), then Summer Catch will give you what you want in spades. However, that will have to be all you're looking for, because it ain't going to give you anything else, unless you're a devotee of dumb voiceovers, half-baked inspirational speeches, and Freddie Prinze Jr. standing around looking awkward. And while both Biel and Murphy are fun to look at, their characters' first names are Tenley and Dede, which is just upsetting. My advice to you is to search the internet for the images of Ms. Biel in her two-piece (which are plentiful), download them, and look at them for one full minute. Then do this one hundred times, and you will have had a more enjoyable experience of watching Summer Catch than I did. See you next week, summer movie fans!