REVIEW: The Sandlot 2

I want to start this by saying that The Sandlot is one of my personal favorite movies of all time. While some may see it as just another kids sports movie about a ragtag bunch of misfits, I feel as though it captures the childlike nostalgia of summertime the way A Christmas Story captures the feeling of the holidays. Like A Christmas Story, The Sandlot is a great little film with something for just about everyone to latch on to. Like A Christmas Story, The Sandlot in no way needed a sequel. And, like A Christmas Story, The Sandlot got one anyway.

This would be the point in which I relay the plot, but I'd just be recounting the plot to the first Sandlot; it's seriously at least 75% the same exact movie. A wimpy kid with the last name of Smalls stumbles upon the titular Sandlot, a vacant field where a group of neighborhood kids (fat one, black one, one with some kind of speech-related quirk, quiet one who's actually good at sports, and the rest) all play baseball in the summer. After the plot meanders around for a bit and you begin to wonder if this is actually going to be an original film instead of a cheap rehash meant to cash-in on early 90's nostalgia, Smalls loses a very valuable possession in the yard of his neighbor, James Earl Jones. This valuable item is now made unattainable, due to James Earl Jones' gigantic, man-eating dog, The Beas-I mean, "The Great Fear". Change the characters' names around some and replace the autographed Babe Ruth ball with a model of a NASA space shuttle and you've got the plot to The Sandlot 2. 

It's really shameless just how much of a rehash this movie is. It's so bad that James Earl Jones' character has an entire bit of dialog at the end that highlights how everything that happened in this movie is just like the things that happened years ago in the first movie, pointing out a little too accurately how the film you just watched amounted to absolutely nothing. Entire scenes and moments from the first movie are just reenacted without a hint of irony or hesistation; they go to a carnival, one kid steals a kiss from an older girl, there's a patriotic "fireworks on Fourth of July" montage, the story of the killer dog is told through a dramatic reenactment shot in black-and-white, the fat kid gets into a name-calling contest with the preppy little league team (and of course someone says "you play ball like A GIRL"), the athletic kid puts on some new shoes and outruns the dog (who SURPRISE, isn't so bad after all), they try to retrieve the lost item with an Erector Set, and James Earl Jones acts like a kinda-spooky-but-still-cool old man who gets a bad rap despite one of the main characters being directly related to one of the main characters from the first Sandlot, so naturally he would know all about James Earl Jones and his dog, thus making this entire thing utterly pointless, but I digress. "Utterly pointless" is a good way to sum up this entire thing, really. Hell, even when the space shuttle is retrieved, we learn that it was pretty much inconsequential. In the first movie, there was some modicum of closure; Smalls had to come clean and admit what he did, while still making up for it. It made for some good character development and added to the overall film; here, the primary conflict is based entirely around misunderstandings, half of which the audience already knows about.

It never really dawned on me just how big an issue that is until I watched this film; probably because no film I've seen prior to this is incompetent enough to present a mystery that the audience is given the answer to while the characters are left in the dark. Normally, interest and tension are created by characters knowing something the viewer does not, but here, we know everything already. We know that James Earl Jones is really nice, we know that the dog isn't a giant monster, we know that the athletic kid is the one who got bit by the dog in New Smalls' story; all of this information is presented to us early on, yet the characters treat it like some great revelation when THEY finally catch up to the audience and learn the truth. It's an objectively wrong way to make a film; all it does is make the characters seem slow-witted and idiotic while bogging down the plot with unnecessary nonsense and annoying the audience to boot. Imagine if The Princess Bride opened up by explaining who the Dread Pirate Roberts was, or if Alien began by informing the audience of the company's true intentions for the crew of the Nostromo. It's such a simple, blunt way to kill any and all interest in a movie, to the point that it's almost fascinating. One must wonder, what was the mission statement here? What goal could director David M. Evans possibly have had in mind when he made the decision to return to direct a straight-to-DVD sequel to a film he directed over a decade prior? How could someone consciously make the same exact film so shamelessly? It's not like money was a huge draw here; The Sandlot was a modest success in 1993 and went on to garner a cult following over the years. Did someone really expect to make a fortune off of a direct-to-video sequel to a cult classic, released in an era when kids' sports flicks were all but extinct? The Sandlot 2 fascinates me with its mere existence, simply because it has no reason to exist. At least, none that I can find.

The Sandlot 2 is a complete and utter nothing of a movie. It's actually something of a shame, considering the first 20 minutes or so are actually not an exact carbon-copy of the first movie. I went in expecting something irredeemably bad, only to get something that felt as if it was almost about to be something original. But then it just became The Sandlot, but again and with much, much worse child actors. If you ever wanted to see what The Sandlot would be like if everyone who isn't James Earl Jones struggled to stutter out every line, then by all means, check out this pointless, insipid sequel. Nobody asked for it, and nobody will remember it. That is the legacy of The Sandlot 2. Well, that and a THIRD one that exists for some reason. A third one that involves time travel, apparently. So there's a point in The Sandlot 2's favor; it may be a terrible rehash of the first movie, but at least it doesn't have time travel.