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Sports movies are typically rife with cliches about redemption, and hustle, effort, and determination leading to success.
"The Yankles" takes those cliches, twists them a tad, and slaps them on screen, resulting in a baseball comedy with little baseball and little new to offer the genre.
"Yankles" is the story of a ragtag group of orthodox Jews who form a baseball team. Their coach is a washed-up ballplayer named Charlie Jones (Brian Wimmer), who committed a Bill Buckner-like gaffe in the field that destroyed his career and his life, leading to a life of alcoholism, and eventually imprisonment for multiple DUIs.
When he gets out, he looks for something easy to fulfill his community service requirements, and is approached about coaching a Jewish baseball team.
But Charlie soon finds this job isn't as easy as it might seem. The team plays in their street clothes, including hats that are more appropriate for tilling fields than shagging flies, and uniforms that include suspenders.
Of course, early on Charlie looks down on the team, which knows almost zilch about the National Pastime, but slowly learns to appreciate them as he sees their heart.
Oh, and Charlie reconnects with his old girlfriend, who wants to move on with her life without the alcoholic who almost destroyed her life.
This is "Major League" with peyos, and not really in a good way. The jokes are mostly stagnant, the acting is pedestrian, and the baseball action is amateurish. That last bit is okay, I suppose, since they're supposed to be amateurs.
It's difficult to pull off a sports movie without certain skills, particularly a baseball film, where it seems it would be easier to handle the motions of a game, but if the edits are mishandled it's easy to spot where. Much of the baseball action in "Yankles" makes those mistakes.
Look out for a familiar face: Don Most, whom most of us probably know from "Happy Days," makes an appearance in a supporting role.
"The Yankles" isn't a great film, and as sports films go you'll find it hits all the bases, but more like David Ortiz than Rickey Henderson.