For love of his name

>> Kevin Costner gets sporty again in For Love of the Game

by JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN

Just when you thought you might never see Kevin Costner in a pair of tight baseball slacks ever again, along comes Sam Raimi's For Love of the Game. Costner plays Billy Chapel, a 40-year-old pitcher who's been a Detroit Tiger for 19 years. In a world where his old batboys have become the batters he's pitching against, Chapel is over-the-hill. On the day he learns he's being booted off the team, he also finds out that his girlfriend, Jane (Kelly Preston), is leaving him.

Even though his arm feels like it's got nothing left, Chapel doesn't know how to give up. And after having sacrificed all of his emotional ties for the love of baseball, he needs to end his career with a perfect game. The film takes place over the course of his last game, intercut with flashbacks of his relationship.

Jane is a regular gal who "hates sexy underwear because it's really uncomfortable" and doesn't want to be his groupie. There's so little chemistry between them that when we're suddenly introduced to Jane's daughter an hour into the movie, it feels like an awkward attempt to up the dramatic ante and give us a little Jerry McGuire. (Even the film's soundtrack has a McGuire-wannabe feel to it.)

The film is really about being a celebrity, and one man's inability to let go of the life of a public figure. Chapel is still a rich, handsome man who can play ball on the weekend with his buddies, so what are we rooting for? Everyone gets old, but not everyone retires a legendary millionaire.

Costner squeezes the Papa Hemingway Old Man and the Sea monologues on the mound for all they're worth. "You're a worthy opponent," he says of one batter. The mound is supposed to be the loneliest spot on Earth, but Charlie Brown gives it more existential dimension.

There's one undeniably moving scene of Chapel crying on the edge of his hotel bed near the film's end, but it feels like too little, too late. For Love of the Game embodies none of Raimi's usual wit or feel for the unexpected. At over two hours, it comes off like a baseball game that's gone into extra innings when you don't care who wins and you just want to o.d. on ballpark franks.

For Love of the Game opens Friday, September 17