"Mr. 3000"

Bernie Mac turns in one of the finest performances of any movie actor this year in this film about a baseball player determined to assume his place in the Hall of Fame.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Sep 17, 2004 | With the major Hollywood studios releasing more movies every year -- some terrific, some lousy, and many languishing in that tweedy middle ground of being just acceptably entertaining -- faithful moviegoers may sometimes have the sense that they're just watching a parade of product march by. Every Friday, there's a new set of movies being extruded through the Play Doh pumper.

It's not that the quality of mainstream Hollywood movies has necessarily fallen off in recent years; it's just that "more" isn't always necessarily better. Sorting through the available options on a weekend evening can be so daunting, it's generally easier to give up and stay at home. Critics generally don't have to sort through listings. But "Mr. 3000," the new picture by Charles Stone III -- the extraordinarily talented director of "Paid in Full" and "Drumline" -- almost makes me wish that I did, simply so I could have the pleasure of taking a chance on it and being thrilled beyond my wildest expectations.

"Mr. 3000" is a superb mainstream entertainment in the purest sense of the term: It's a picture made to please a wide audience without ever pandering to it. Bernie Mac plays Stan Ross, a pro ballplayer with a surly attitude. When he scores his 3,000th hit, he rushes into the stands to snatch the ball away from the happy kid who's caught it -- it's his souvenir, and he's not about to let anybody else walk off with it.

He promptly retires, leaving his team, the Milwaukee Brewers, stranded for the rest of the season. He uses his earnings to open a sports bar -- actually, he owns a whole mall, including a Chinese restaurant called "3,000 Woks" -- and sits back as he waits to be voted into the Hall of Fame.

But a statistics error reveals that this self-proclaimed Mr. 3000 is really three hits short of the record he's been bragging about for years. To finally get that coveted brass plaque in Cooperstown, he has to return to the game he left 10 years earlier, which means not only beating himself back into shape, but earning the respect of all the colleagues and fans he alienated with his snotty attitude.

If that sounds like your basic "Scrooge-type guy finds redemption" plot, well, you're 3,000 percent right. But "Mr. 3000" is so deftly written (by Eric Champnella and Keith Mitchell and Howard Michael Gould, from a story by Champnella and Mitchell) and so gracefully directed that you're never quite sure where it's going next -- and getting there is all the fun anyway.

It's also important to note that while "Mr. 3000" is largely about baseball, it isn't the kind of sports movie that demands that you understand the psychological (or technical) intricacies of the game from the start. Stone and his actors convey all that information beneath the surface, without clubbing us over the head with it. It's a great sports movie that effortlessly doubles as a romantic comedy.

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