You Gotta Believe: Real Life Underdog Story Strikes Out as Feel-Bad Drama

By Liz Braun

Rating: C

Twenty years ago, a ragtag kids’ baseball team from Texas made it to the Little League World Series against impossible odds. The Westside Little League team, based in Fort Worth, Texas, was essentially a pack of adolescent no-hopers when the opportunity arose to form an all-star team and start moving up through state and regional competitions toward the Little League World Series. 

It was 2002, and the team pulled together on behalf of Bobby Ratliff, who was fighting terminal cancer that summer. Ratliff and local lawyer Jon Kelly coached the Fort Worth team and both had sons who played for Westside. Ratliff was a dedicated supporter of the players, and the team returned that loyalty over an amazing summer, working their hearts out to get to the Little League World Series on his behalf.

Michael Cash believes, some of us not so much

There were just enough surprises and unexpected breaks along the way for baseball fans to sit up and take notice; the team’s inspirational story won them plenty of media attention and it was easy for people to root for these determined underdogs.

It’s not as easy to root for You Gotta Believe, a new movie about Westside’s journey to the Little League World Series. 

You Gotta Believe has a strong cast and stars Luke Wilson as the dying Bobby Ratliff and Greg Kinnear as lawyer Jon Kelly. The movie was filmed in Southern Ontario, which may explain why Sarah Gadon and Molly Parker show up in woefully underwritten roles as the wives of these men. 

You Gotta Believe is directed by Ty Roberts (12 Mighty Orphans) and written by Lane Garrison. The title was the rallying cry of the New York Mets in the early ‘70s, courtesy ballplayer Tug McGraw; most of the rest of the writing seems to come from the sport-as-metaphor-for-life school of shopworn fluff. 

Scenes of the kids playing baseball in You Gotta Believe are fun and chaotic, but the movie soon veers into family suffering porn with dad’s cancer. As Ratliff, Luke Wilson gets tasked with scenes of post-chemo barfing, hair and weight loss, and looking glum when he has to ask his lawyer friend to make him up a will.

The movie ricochets between cute baseball material and uplifting young male bonding scenes, to depressing bits with the kids asking if dad is going to die and Ratliff coughing up blood. 

For this viewer, the odd mention of God and heaven, snippets of archival news footage of Satchel Paige and moments such as Ratliff’s son (Michael Cash) saying earnestly, “If we could win, I know he’ll get better,” suggest a flirtation with divine intervention and the miraculous in baseball that is super off-putting. You Gotta Believe is billed as family entertainment. Whose family, exactly, they never specify.

You Gotta Believe. Directed by Ty Roberts. Starring Luke Wilson, Greg Kinnear and Michael Cash. Opens in theatres Friday, August 30.