During the last years of his life, actor-director Christopher Reeve spent his time working on his dream project, "Everyone's Hero." This G-rated animated film tells the tale of a young, downtrodden boy named Yankee Irving (Jake Austin) who has a love for baseball yet a tragic lack of baseball skills.
When Yankee finds a talking baseball he names Screwy (Ritchie Allen), his world gets turned upside down. His father gets fired for suspicion of stealing Babe Ruth's bat, Darling (Whoopi Goldberg), and Yankee is the only one who can save the day.
To really become "Everyone's Hero," Yankee needs to recover the bat and make his way from his hometown of New York to Chicago in time for the tie-breaking game seven of World Series 32 between Yankee's hometown team and the cheating Chicago Cubs.
Since this is a Christopher Reeve movie, it's easy to want it to be good. Unfortunately, the movie has no real redeeming qualities beyond its animation and relatively stellar cast.
The plot is one that may interest little kids, but time flow is extremely awkward and unrealistic. Yankee gets on a train to Chicago in the morning. He ends up somewhere in Pittsburgh and then walks to Cincinnati, all within the span of one day.
The film also lacks historical accuracy. The movie is supposedly set in the 1930s, yet there are Babe Ruth bobble heads (not introduced until the '50s) and posters that look like Sports Stars Posters made them.
It seems as though these trinkets were added for a few moments of comic relief, such as when the Cubs' manager mutilates the bobble heads with pencils and make-up. At one particularly amusing point he hits two of the bobble heads together and says "Why ya hittin' yourself, Babe?"
The rest of the comedic attributes are limited to playground humor. There are lots of fart jokes, silly faces, train-top break-dancing and innovative sign-to-the-nuts jokes. Really, all of the comedy except for Lefty's occasional stupidity was based around crude comments that Screwy contributed, most notably about the smell of Lefty's feet.
Like the majority of children's films, the plot is shaky and depends on coincidental meetings in train stations and the fact that both the bat and the ball could act as third and fourth eyes (and consciences) for Yankee.
Yet this plot was worse than most kids' movies. Usually there is some semblance of rationale for the transition of one scene to another. This one, however, has less explanation to it than the fourth "Harry Potter" movie.
Let's not forget the message of this film: If you disrespect your parents and leave town, you'll save the world and everything will be okay in the end. Really, this movie could only be recommended to either a playground posse that makes fart noises with their hands and laughs hysterically for five minutes, or to the pre-teen boys who don't want to admit to their friends that they still like animated movies.
