At the risk of seeming obvious, I am a huge sports fan and a massive baseball fan. My favorite team is the Boston Red Sox. Which in turn makes me love sports movies and baseball films inarticulate quite a bit. There have been a lot of great baseball films such as Pride of the Yankees, The Natural, Bull Durham, Major League, and Field of Dreams just to name a handful. Sometimes filmmakers do Christian versions of sports films and the latest is The Hill: The Ricky Hill Story.

This story takes place in Branford Texas in 1975. James Hill (Dennis Quaid) is a small-town pastor at his local church. He has a wife, Helen (Joelle Carter), and three kids. One of those kids is Ricky (Jesse Berry, Colin Ford) who is an aspiring baseball player but he has a disability. He has braces on his legs which hinders the way he walks and runs.  Add in the fact that his staunch father doesn’t want him to play either and it’s not a great dream. All of this doesn’t stop him from achieving that dream though. It’s just not as easy to achieve as it would be for others.

This film has a lot of sports and biopic cliches. The first is an overbearing father figure and the second is something that is stopping the main character from achieving his dream. The father played by Quaid is right in line with so many similar plot points in other films and the disability of the main character’s legs is a perfect way for the filmmakers to create the underdog scenario. These are the typical tropes we’ve seen so many times before. 

There are also some other subplots of poverty and bullying by other kids that make this a well-rounded film. It’s just not one of the best baseball films I’ve seen. It just focuses too much on the personal life of the Hill character and his family until the very end. He does have a lot of obstacles in his way on and off the field. Even a character played by Scott Glenn is an obstacle for him that he has to overcome.

The cast has a few bigger-name actors in it like Quaid, Carter, and Glenn by Berry and Ford as Hill is the real star of the film. They haven’t been in much before this but they bring a level of authenticity to this story. The stuff they go through is very realistic and they bring real gravitas to this character at an earlier age and an older age. This is an inspiring story from that aspect. It just doesn’t go to the left level like some other baseball films have.

The direction by Jeff Celentino and the screenplay by Angelo Pizzo and Scott Marshall Smith are a bit mundane. They don’t bring anything new to this genre of inspiring sports film. They just are a bit of paint-by-numbers. This probably didn’t have much of a budget either and the baseball didn’t look very real to me. They used editing tricks to try and make the baseball look authentic but it isn’t.  I just wish they went the extra mile for this story unfortunately they don’t. 

One aspect of the film that was pretty good was the score by Geoff Zanelli. He creates an inspiring score to go with this inspiring film. The music is very grand and bigger than movie it’s in. The composer brought his a game to this project that doesn’t live up to his superb work. There is just grandiose feel of this music . It hit me tight away while watching the movie. It’s one of the better scores of the year.

The Hill, as the title suggests, can’t get over itself. It’s just not that good of a sports or baseball film for that matter. The baseball isn’t very good in a baseball film either. The performances of the two actors who play Ricky Hill are very good amongst a decent cast of experienced actors like Quaid, Carter, and Glenn. The direction and writing are a bit subpar in the context of other sports and baseball films. This is just not a very good film despite its inspiring story. All behind-the-screen stuff lets this man’s story down in the end. 

2 ½ stars

Dan Skip Allen