After serving 17 years in prison for a violent mistake he made in his youth, a once-aspiring baseball player returns to his Bronx neighborhood.
Sonny, a young wide-eyed man with slick backed hair walks on a pristine baseball diamond in a prison yard that honestly looks a bit too well maintained to be an actual prison. He steps up to the home plate to take his turn at bat, the pitcher with a very fake face tattoo keeps egging him on with very cheesy kissing faces. After intentionally trying to walk Sonny with a headshot pitch, a large fight breaks out between the rival prison baseball teams and a riot ensues. I had a hard time keeping a straight face when all the elements from the weather to the tear gas canisters in the riot look like they were cheaply added with animation perplexingly not some subtle CGI or even a fog machine. After the fake smoke clears, it’s seventeen years later and Sonny is now grown up into huge buff Joe Manganiello. Upon returning home he begins inexplicably crying over seemingly sentimental dishes in his mother’s kitchen. His next move is to visit the grieving family that seems to be the hapless victim of his past crime. He selfishly tells them he wants to apologize when the last thing this sad family needs is to see the killer of their loved one.
As part of his release from prison, Sonny meets his parole officer played by Dennis O’Hare. O’Hare is such an amazing chameleonic actor but even in this role, he’s paper-thin and frankly an annoying presence. Oddly, for some reason, hair and make-up decided to give him an unkempt just-woke-up hairstyle, his scene stood out as the most out-of-place and bizarre.
The most head-scratching aspect of the setting is that Sonny’s cohorts offer him dock work and other bygone labor of yesteryear. It would have been much more realistic if his fellow goombas were trying to recruit him for some scam like Herbalife or soul-crushing Amazon warehouse work.
For an actual couple, Sofía Vergara and Manganiello have very little onscreen flair. They seem more like acquaintances than old lovers with an unfinished past. To be fair, their scenes together aren’t all flat, one moment is really sweet when they are reminiscing in their favorite diner while classic doo-wop songs play on the jukebox. They discuss at length Sonny’s regrets and getting recruited by the Yankees right before his prison sentence. The best performance comes from Michael Rispoli, he’s been in countless productions but probably most famous for his role as Jackie Aprile in “The Sopranos.” Rispoli plays an old friend who runs a minor league team chock full of Yankee hopeful, not too long after Sonny is recruited to join the team.
Speaking of “The Sopranos,” there’s quite a few alumni popping in here and there. Vincent Pastore appears as a bartender saying with that east coast discernable cadence, “Facebook and InstaSham are ruining my bar business since no one is meeting in person anymore, ohhhh!”
I feel like most sports stories focus on going for gold or a team that’s against the odds. It’s refreshing to see someone with a promising career dealing with tragedy. In the end, I just wish the storytelling and production could’ve matched the screenplay’s intention.
Available on DVD September 17th from Paramount Home Entertainment
